Ten Rituals You’re Already Doing
If you have already downloaded your Daily Ritual Worksheet, this is a great resource for you. The second and third pages of the worksheet bundle ask you to reflect on the daily rituals already in your routine and explore the ways they might become sacred practices in daily life – think emptying the dishwasher, sitting in traffic, folding laundry, fixing something broken. Literally, the rituals and practices of your daily life. So, if you have gotten to your Daily Consolations or Desolations section and find yourself wondering how your existing rituals are invitations of deeper formation, this is especially for you!
Although this resource is intended to be used alongside the worksheet, feel free to let this create ideas for yourself of the rich ways that our daily rituals may offer us deeper avenues of grace.
Now let’s get started!
Before we unpack practices, there are a few resources that you may find especially helpful as you are exploring the intersection of daily rituals and your spiritual life. Tish Harrison Warren has a fabulous book called Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life from which I’ve drawn a few of these rituals. Another vital resource is Casper ter Kuile’s The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices. Everything from throwing on your favorite rom-com to meaningful hikes to intentional reading are included in Casper’s work. Both of these books are worth having as inspiration for your own rituals. I’ve borrowed a few rituals from both of these books and thrown in a few from my own life to get your wheel’s turning on the rituals that might be right for you.
Here we go!
1. Brushing Your Teeth
2. Cleaning Your Home
3. Fixing Something Broken
4. Sitting in Traffic
5. Taking Out the Trash
6. Making Your Bed
7. Calling a Friend
8. Working Out
9. Drinking Coffee
10. Baking Bread
Important preface: the draw of one ritual for me may be completely different for you. Here’s what I mean. For reasons I wish I understood better, I detest brushing my teeth in the evenings (I do it, because cavities are painful and expensive, but I dread it). I am tempted to say I wish I knew why I loathed it, but I do have an inkling. In the evenings, brushing my teeth is one of the very last things I do. So, by the time that my teeth-brushing chore comes around, I’m tired and want nothing more than to just get into bed and end my day. In short: I do not ever, literally ever, feel like brushing my teeth in the evening. And it annoys me that I have to do things I don’t feel like doing.
Ding, ding, ding. There’s my invitation. Over the last few months, I’ve tried to invite God to meet me in these moments: the moments I don’t want to do something because I don’t feel like it. While I experience this most consistently during my evening teeth-brushing, there is no doubt it affects me in more ways than just my teeth. How can I become the kind of person who shows up even when I don’t feel it? How can God meet me in my moments of exhaustion, when I just want to be done? My two-minutes of dreaded teeth-brushing have now become a sacred ritual where I invite grace to work on my heart. And my teeth.
That’s just one example. The same can be said for all of these. In many of the retreats I lead, we share the things of daily life that we dread and three things come up most often: fixing something broken, sitting in traffic, and taxes (I didn’t add taxes to this list, but it’s another great example!). Here’s what I often hear: I get so frustrated when something breaks because it affects the next thing I have to do, and now I can’t do that, and I feel totally out of control. Interesting. What if our unwelcomed encounters with lack of control could trigger not only panic and frustration (because no doubt they may) but also grace, surrender, gratitude. What if they are reminders that I, indeed, am actually not in control and – even better – I’m not called to be. Sure, it’s infuriating when your coffee maker breaks on the mornings you really need that extra dose of caffeine; but, in tandem with that very real frustration, what if we also invited surrender?
So far I’ve shared two somewhat negative examples (desolations), because these are the rituals I find it’s harder to name as invitations of grace. But the same goes for your joyful and peaceful practices (consolations). On the mornings that your coffee maker does come through, what if your morning cup of joe were to become an intentional sacred starter to your day? Or, if you’re anything like me and prefer to clean up dinner rather than cook it, how can your end-of-the-day clean-up (that you enjoy) be a practice that recenters you?
If you feel like you are disingenuously over-spiritualizing a practice, then let that go and let the practice simply be what it is. But if you probe a bit and find that there is something deeper (you hate sitting in traffic because slowing down is really, really hard for you), it might just be an invitation of grace. So greet it. The invitations are endless, and the fact that they appear in our daily rituals and practices is quite miraculous, if you ask me. God cares enough to meet us in the stuff of our daily life. So meet God there – in your laundry folding, in your dreaded (or delighted? …is it even possible?) taxes, in your daily walks, your regular frustrations, and your routine joys.
Surely the Lord is in this place and I did know it, Jacob proclaimed (Gen 28:16). Might we let our intentional and sacred routines help us know it. The Lord in this place. Might we know it.
