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Famous Tish Harrison Warren Quotes

“There is a profound connection between the sleep we get in our beds each night and the sacramental rest we know each Sunday in our gathered worship. Both gathered worship and our sleep habits profess our loves, our trusts, and our limits. Both involve discipline and ritual. Both require that we cease relying on our own effort and activity and lean on God for his sufficiency. Both expose our vulnerability. Both restore.”

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Book:Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
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“We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation. We can't be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life. Each kind of work is therefore its own kind of craft that must be developed over time, both for our own sanctification and for the good of the community. As we seek to do our work well and hone our craft, we are developed and honed in our work. Our task is not to somehow inject God into our work but to join God in the work he is already doing in and through our vocational lives. Therefore, holiness itself is something like a craft—not an abstract state to which we ascend but an earthy wisdom and love that is part and parcel of how we spend our day.”

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Book:Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
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“We are topsy-turvy. We don't know what's best for us. The things I'm most afraid of are often the very things that will set me free. The desolate places in my life that I most want to avoid are the very places God waits to meet me. The things I want most - and which I grip, white knuckled - are often the things that, were it not for God's gracious intervention, would diminish me, even kill me. The way to save my life is to lose it.”

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Book:Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
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“Suffering strips away the self. This sounds terribly painful, and it is. But the meaning and object of suffering isn't pain; it is to learn to give and receive love. God isn't a sadist who delights in using agony to teach us a lesson. But in the alchemy of redemption, God can take what is only sorrow and transform it into the very path by which we learn to love God and let ourselves be loved. This is the strange (and usually unwanted) way of abundant life - the dying necessary to bring resurrection.”

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Book:Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
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“I face things every day, big and small, that are difficult but have not killed me. And I'm finding that what doesn't kill me actually makes me weaker, and maybe that's the point - that the way of glory is discovered through, and only through, the cross. In life's school of love, suffering - what doesn't kill us - makes us more alive to our need and helplessness and, therefore, more able to give and receive love.”

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Book:Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
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“To walk through suffering as a Christian - to share in Christ's sufferings - we have to face the darkness. We have to feel the things we hate to feel - sadness, loss, loneliness. We have to drink the bitter cup we've been given. No shortcuts. No free passes. But this is the strange way of true comfort. It's the only way to discover soothing that is substantial enough to bare the weight of our souls.”

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Book:Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
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“God loves us passionately and wants to bring us joy and flourishing, but this doesn't preclude a cross. God's love is refracted through the cross, which often makes it hard to see or recognize. But if we are to learn to trust - to place the weight of our lives on the love of God - we can only learn this through the cross. We come to know and trust God's love more deeply through our own crosses, the things that make us feel we cannot go on, the things that make us tired - the job loss, the break up, the sickness, the loneliness, the long struggle with sin, the estrangement from a friend, the disappointment, the deaths of those we love, our own death. I wish there were some easier way, some way to learn to trust God that was paved with luxury and endless ease, but per crucem ad lucem: the way to the light runs smack dab through darkness - or more accurately, we discover the light speeding toward us these very dark places.”

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Book:Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
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“The future orientation of Christian time reminds us that we are people on the way. It allows us to live in the present at an alternative people, waiting for what is to come, but never giving up on our telos. We are never quite comfortable. We seek justice, practice mercy, and herald the kingdom come.”

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Book:Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
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“It is no accident that the psalmist enjoins us to taste and see that the Lord is good—not simply to reason or confess that God is good, but to taste it. My body, this tea, and the quiet twilight are teaching me God's goodness through my senses. I'm tasting, hearing, feeling, seeing, and smelling that God is good.”

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Book:Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
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“But unless we make space for grief, we cannot know the depths of the love of God, the healing God wrings from pain, the way grieving yields wisdom, comfort, even joy. If we do not make time for grief, it will not simply disappear. Grief is stubborn. It will make itself heard or we will die trying to silence it. If we don't face it directly it comes out sideways, in ways that aren't always recognizable as grief: explosive anger, uncontrollable anxiety, compulsive shallowness, brooding, bitterness, unchecked addiction. Grief is a ghost that can't be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled.”

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Book:Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
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“But every evening, whether we like it or not, we must admit again that we are not unlimited. Our bodies get tired. Our efforts prove futile. We are needy. Yielding to sleep confesses this reality: a confession that is countercultural and revolutionary. We are not sufficient; we need a caretaker. And this must affect our bodily routines, our worship, and our view of God.”

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Book:Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
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“A local congregation, a parish, is our small, concrete entry into the universal church. It is the basic unit of Christian community and the place where we encounter God in Word and sacrament. The body of Christ—ancient, global, catholic—is only known, loved, and served through the gritty reality of our local context.”

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Book:Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
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“There is no yokeless option. It seems to me the weary should be unyoked altogether, but instead Jesus suggests that all people are under a yoke, that it's impossible to not be yoked to someone or something. It may be the yoke of religious law and scrupulous spirituality. It may be the yoke of our desires and passions, as raucous and exhausting as a newborn baby. It may be the yoke of cultural norms and assumptions, the water we swim in. Jesus calls the weary not to follow their own way - that would be a heavy yoke indeed - but to submit to him and learn from him, to take on his yoke... Jesus' yoke is light not because he promises ease or success, but because he promises to bear our burdens with us. He promises to shoulder our load.”

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Book:Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
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