Liturgizing Life
by Matthew Warner
Liturgize: to celebrate liturgically
Liturgical: form of public worship, ritual.
To “liturgize your life” is to make your life — your work and leisure — into a celebration of what you worship (which is an act of worship itself). It is to put into place the rituals, habits, and structure which not only ensure that your life remains ordered correctly, but which allow you to share your worship in communion with others.
Everyone worships something. The word “worship” comes from “worth ship” — so what is of most worth to you? That’s what you worship.
Every moment of this life is precious and worth celebrating. But unless we are intentional about it, it’s easy to forget to celebrate, take it for granted, stay too busy, get distracted, not always feel like it, or fall into bad habits. When this happens, we risk slipping into a life that is not properly ordered around what we value most. Liturgizing one’s life is a way of protecting against all of those things.
Even better, liturgizing your life is what makes celebrating with others possible. It’s what coordinates a group of people to do something in communion with each other — whether at the same time and place or across the world and down through the ages.
But it first requires being intentional about what you worship (i.e. what is most important to you), and then ordering your work, home, activities, environment, habits and rituals around what you worship and in community with others.
Liturgizing your life leads to a much richer, more meaningful life, where we worship the right thing and become the people we set out to become. And as time slips faster and faster through our fingers, we will be more able to cherish and celebrate each moment of this “one, wild and precious life” with the thoughtful presence and gratitude that it deserves.
A Return to Ritual
Traditionally determined by seasonal harvests, religion, or just plain-ol’ what our parents (and their parents) did, many of the most valuable rituals of life were typically taken for granted. But now with extreme mobilization and globalization combined with a modern snobbishness, broken families, and rapid cultural change — when it comes to the question of “how to live?” — we find ourselves aimless and lost at sea. Having eschewed most ritual and tradition altogether, we are gradually sobering up to a sense that we may have lost something we really needed. And now we wish we hadn’t thrown the oars and the map overboard.
We’re hungry for tradition (the democracy of the dead), meaningful food culture, helpful gender and generational roles, fasting and feasting and the many cultural rituals that somehow managed to infuse thousands of years of accumulated human wisdom into the simplest of lives.