Tish Harrison Warren: Making the Bed
Liturgy of the Ordinary (2016)
A few years ago, right before Lent, I became curious about bed making. It occurred to me that thousands, perhaps even millions, of adults make their beds – a shocking idea to me, because I almost never did. I had assumed that most people, outside of a small group of elite Pinterest-perfect superhumans, didn’t make their beds unless they were hosting a party or their mom was visiting. I know that for bed-making devotees this is hard to fathom, but to my mind bed making was something we all collectively shed as soon as we could, like wearing a retainer or doing algebra homework.
What was the point? You'd mess it up again that evening. It is a Sisyphean exercise. Make the bed, unmake it, make it again, over and over. And for what? The dishes must be washed so you can reuse them; the laundry must be done so you can have clean clothes (although I stretch that as far as I can.) But the bed functions just as well with the sheets messy as it does with them pulled tight and tucked in neatly. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy that feeling of crawling into a freshly made bed, especially with freshly cleaned sheets, but not so much that I actually considered making it.
Out of my new-found curiosity, I asked a close friend whether she made her bed. She did. Not daily, but more often than not, and funnily enough she usually did it in the evening, right before she crawled in. Well, that made no sense and totally intrigued me. So, I took to Facebook and did an informal survey, asking who made their bed and how often. People responded – lots of people – with surprising passion.
Some made it daily, first thing, zealously. Some never made it. Some thought it was preposterous to even consider making it, while others thought that not making your bed was akin to not brushing your teeth or not paying your taxes – something meriting disgust if not jail time. Many made their bed erratically, maybe three out of seven days. A shocking number made their bed at night. Some promised me that bed making would change my life – that I’d be more successful, happy and productive with a made bed.
At that time, my typical morning routine was that shortly after waking, I’d grab my smartphone. Like digital caffeine, it would prod my foggy brain into coherence and activity. Before getting out of bed, I’d check my email, scroll through the news, glance at Facebook and Twitter. Technology began to fill every empty moment of the day. Without realizing it, I had slowly built a habit: a steady resistance to and dread of boredom.
After my makeshift sociological study on bed making, I decided for Lent that year, I’d exchange routines. I’d stop waking up with my phone and instead I’d make the bed, first thing. I also decided to spend the first few minutes after I made the bed sitting (on my freshly made bed) in silence. So, I banished my smartphone from the bedroom. My new Lenten routine didn’t make me wildly successful or cheerfully buoyant as some had promised, but I began to notice, very subtly, that my day was turning out differently.
The first activity of the day, the first move I made, was not that of a consumer, but that of a co-laborer with God. Instead of going to a device for a morning fix of instant infotainment, I touched the tangible softness of our well-worn covers, tugged against wrinkled cotton, felt the hard wood floors against my feet. In the creation story, God entered chaos and made order and beauty. In making my bed, I reflected that creative act in the tiniest, most ordinary way. In my small chaos, I made small order. And then there was a little space, an ordered rectangle in my messy home. And that rectangle somehow carved out a small, ordered space in my messy, distracted mind.
And I sat. At times, I’d read Scripture. Most often I’d pray. But mostly, I’d invite God into the day and just sit. Silent. Sort of listening. Sort of just sitting. Most of our days, and therefore most of our lives, are driven by habit and routine. Our way of being-in-the-world works its way into us through ritual and repetition. James K.A. Smith explains that a particular view of “the good life” is ingrained in us through repetitive practices that motivate how we live and what we love. We are shaped every day, whether we know it or not, by practices - rituals and liturgies, that make us who we are. We receive these practices not only from the church or the Scriptures but from the culture, from the "air around us."
Flannery O'Connor once told a young friend to "push back as hard as the age that pushes against you." The church is to be a radically alternative people, marked by the love of the triune God in each area of life. But often we are not sure how to become this sort of alternative people. Though we believe deeply in the gospel, though we put our hope in the resurrection, we often feel like the way we spend our days looks very similar to that of our un-believing neighbors - with perhaps a bit of extra spirituality thrown in.
Some Christians seem to think that we push back against the age primarily by believing correctly - by getting the right ideas in our head or having a biblical worldview. While doctrinal orthodoxy is crucial in the Christian life, for the most part we are not primarily motivated by our conscious thoughts. We do not usually think about our beliefs or worldview as we brush our teeth, go grocery shopping, and drive our cars. Most of what shapes our life and culture works “below the mind” - in our gut, in our loves.
Other Christians have believed that pushing against the age involves a radical rejection of the workaday world. If we can sufficiently separate ourselves from culture, the thinking goes, either by withdrawing from it and rejecting certain kinds of art, music, media, and participation in civic life, or by a kind of Christian radicalism, forsaking average careers, going overseas, or intentionally living among the poor – that then we will be formed as an alternative people. While these approaches may form us as alternative consumers, they do not necessarily form us as worshipers.
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. In church on Sunday, we participate in a liturgy, a ritualized way of worship, that we repeat each week and by which we are transformed. We also have everyday habits, formative practices, that constitute daily liturgies. By reaching for my smartphone every morning, I had developed a ritual that trained me toward a certain end: entertainment and stimulation via technology. Regardless of my professed worldview or particular Christian subculture, my unexamined daily habit was shaping me into a worshipper of glowing screens.
Examining my daily liturgy as a liturgy – as something that both revealed and shaped what I love and worship - allowed me to realize that my daily practices were malforming me, making me less alive, less human, less able to give and receive love throughout my day. My Lenten bed-making ritual teaches me to slow down, to bravely enter a dull Tuesday morning, to embrace daily life, believing that in these small moments God meets us and brings meaning to our average day.
In a culture that craves the big, the entertaining, the dramatic and the shocking, cultivating a life with space for silence and repetition is necessary for sustaining a life of faith. Daily life, dishes in the sink, children that ask the same questions and want the same stories again and again and again, the long doldrums of the afternoon, these things are filled with repetition. And much of the Christian life is returning over and over to the same work and same spiritual struggles again and again. The work of faith is daily and repetitive. Again and again, we repent and believe.
I needed to retrain my mind not to bolt at the first sight of boredom or buck against stillness. That took the cultivation of habit. And habits have to start small and to start somewhere - sitting half-bored to pray and to listen on sheets tucked in, covers pulled tight.
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Tish Harison Warren’s work appears in Christianity Today, The Well, Comment Magazine and elsewhere. For eight years she worked on campus with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Vanderbilt and UTAustin. She is a priest in the Anglican Church.
Coming Next: G.K. Chesterton: The Strangest Story in the World - The Everlasting Man (1955)