Matthew Wright’s Reviews > Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life > Status Update

So I will fight against my bodies, falling this. I will care for it as best as I can, knowing that my body is secret, and that caring, for it is a holy act.

When you can’t find words to pray, you can kneel down.

When We degenerate our bodies, whether through neglect, or staring at our faces, and counting up our flaws.-we are belittling. A secret site, a worship space, more wonders than the most glorious, ancient Cathedral. We are standing before the Grand Canyon, or the 16 chapel, and rolling our eyes.

Because of Christ’s embodiment, the ways we care for our bodies are not meaningless necessities that keep us well enough to do the real work of worship & discipleship. Instead, the small task of caring for our bodies, act as an embodied confession that our Creator, who mysteriously became flesh, has made our bodies well and deserves worship in and through our very cells, muscles, tissues, & teeth.

All Christians often want to skip the boring, daily stuff to get to the thrill of an edgy faith. But it is in the deadlines of the Christian Faith the making the bed, they’re doing the dishes, the praying for our enemies, they’re reading of the Bible, the quiet, the small – – that God uses to transform us and make roots and grow us.

I am a Christian who belongs for revolution, for things to be made new and whole and beautiful and in big ways. But what I am slowly seeing is that you cannot get to the revolution without learning to do the dishes. The kind of spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary.

What we need is to learn a way of being in the world that transforms us, day by day, by the rhythms of repentance and faith. We need to learn the slow habits of loving God and those around us.

When we gaze at the richness of the gospel and the Church and find them dull and uninteresting, it is actually we who have been hollowed out. We have lost our capacity to see wonders where true wonders lie. We must be formed as people who are capable of appreciating goodness, truth, and beauty.

Every church denomination in the world has a repetitive practice of worship. Therefore, the question is not whether we have a liturgy. The question is, “What kind of people is our liturgy forming us to be?”

Whoever we are, whatever we believe, wherever we live, and whatever our consumer preferences may be, we spend our days doing things — we live in routines, formed by habits and practices.

To be an alternative people is to be formed differently – – to take up practices and habits that aim our love and desire toward God.