In his Cultural Liturgies Project, James K.A. Smith argues that we humans are liturgical animals—worshiping beings who become what we love. We are, he writes, “creatures who can’t not worship and who are fundamentally formed by worship practices, Our everyday rituals, including the “secular liturgies” that usually pass under our notice, shape our souls. Our daily rhythms are not neutral; we are always being formed either towards or away from the kingdom. Nothing is insignificant, not even the banal details: “Even the most mundane can instill a whole cosmology.”
Smith argues for the “formative power of practices—communal, embodied rhythms, rituals, and routines that over time quietly and unconsciously prime and shape our desires and most fundamental longings.” Quoting Nathan Mitchell’s Meeting Mystery, he writes, “our bodies make our prayers. . . . After all, the mind will say anything one wants to hear; the body never lies” (60). Material beings that we are, the particulars of a place have much to teach us. Traditions such as the Eastern Orthodox are fond of saying that we, as physical beings, need the tangible elements of the liturgy—incense, icons, bowing, crossing, candles—to engage all five senses. We are not merely spirits, but neither are we merely bodies; we are embodied creatures made in God’s image, made to take on Christ’s likeness, made to worship him in spirit and truth.
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