From the liturgy [. . .] I again learnt how indispensable it remains to find ways & forms of working what has been thought in an essential way into the matter of dwelling.  A dwelling within the praise of God transpires in the liturgy; but there’s often also a doubt as to what extent a fruitful closeness is still alive.  On the other hand, neither in the Catholic nor the Protestant Church can a creative or history-making piety be enforced by a liturgical movement—unless God speaks himself.  This is why it [that is, the liturgy] may after all be a proper way to prepare us to hear what addresses us, to furnish a presentiment of its realm, & to arouse this in the individual.

                                                                             —Martin Heidegger

Routine matters are not at all routine matters.

Routine really does matter.  

If the first sentence of this post after the quotation from Heidegger caught your attention when you first read it, consider carefully just how you were taking it as you read it, such that it did so catch your attention.

If it did not catch your attention when you first read it, attentively reread that sentence. Keep attentively rereading it until it does catch your attention. When it does, consider carefully just how you read it when it finally did catch your attention.

Reading is a routine matter for anyone who is literate. It is so routine, that one rarely pays any great attention to just what it is one is doing when one reads. Yet reading is no routine matter unworthy of careful attention.

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If the first sentence of this post after the quotation from Heidegger is not read as a self-contradiction, then what it says might also be put this way: matters of routine are not at all routine matters.

To express the same point even yet another way: the routines whereby we structure our daily lives are not at all unimportant everyday matters.

Rather, the creation and observation of routines to structure our daily lives is, as Heidegger suggests in the quotation above, indispensable to any thoughtful dwelling — which means to being ever truly at home in our own human lives. 

It is a common prejudice to estimate a man’s worth by the matter he deals with, not the manner in which he treats it.

                                                — Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)

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The lines by Heidegger at the top of this post are from a letter he wrote to his wife on October 25, 1951, while he was on a retreat at Beuron Archabbey, a Roman Catholic Benedictine monastery not far from Heidegger’s hometown of Meßkirch, which is in the current southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg.  Heidegger made many such retreats at Beuron in the course of his life.

In the 19th century — the century in which Heidegger was born, on September 26, 1889, and in remembrance of which I am pleased to be able to put up this post today, on that same date 133 years later — Beuron Abbey was a center of the “Liturgical Movement” that burgeoned during that century. That movement soon began to have an impact upon various Protestant Christian denominations as well, from the Church of England and the entire world-wide Anglican Communion to the Lutheran Church and all other Protestant churches in which liturgy played a major role.

The word liturgy derives eventually from the ancient Greek leitourgos, which itself comes ultimately from a combining of laos ("people”) plus ergon ("work"), the latter in turn  derived from the presumed Proto Indo-European root *werg-, meaning "to do." Thus “liturgy” is “the work of the people.” In at least one of its aspects the Liturgical Movement that began in the 19th century involved the translation of the ancient rites of the Roman Catholic Church from Latin into vernacular languages, thus restoring them to “the people” themselves. A liturgy removed from the ready understanding and active participation of the very people to whom it is supposed to belong no longer functions liturgically at all: it has become, as it were, an anti-liturgy.

In a genuine liturgy, a genuine work of the people, what “transpires,” as Heidegger puts in the lines at the top of this pose, is the building of true “dwelling within the praise of God.”

That, praise God, is no routine matter.

*     *     *

“Power to the people!”

NOTE TO READERS: My next post, “Impossible Routines for Inhabiting the Uninhabitable,” is due to appear on Monday, October 10, and is a sequel to today’s post, “Routine Matters.”