Cat, I just wanted to point out that the word 'routine' has developed negative associations because it implies increasing nonchalance and overfamiliarity. If instead you use the word 'rhythm' it immediately means something different. Let's take walking for example. What could be more routine than that? but it is also the only way we can actually get somewhere. (without wheels I mean!)
Also music. If the music doesnt have barlines and a tempo there is a feeling of aimlessness and wandering. Without rhythm we cannot 'move on through' which is what we have to do in the journey of life when 'things get really tough' (which is quite often).
Your post has made me understand better the nature of the problem I have had for so many years with the word 'Christ'. What Paul says about the 'body of Christ' is very Greek because it rings philosophical bells which I do not think Paul was necessarily wanting to ring at all. 'Becoming a part of the body of Christ' is a walking away from the selfishness: we join a church or a community and this helps to free us from our own 'fluidity' and whimsy and we hope to become absorbed, gradually, into a 'body' which is our way towards participation in the life of God. When we go to church we are participating in a 'rhythm' which is beyond our own personal 'routine'. When we sing we join in something 'larger' than ourselves. So it is with prayer. When we pray we are not simply sending up our own cry to God: it is a sharing in a deeper cry, not even just for Christians alone but for all of our brothers and sisters; believers and non-believers too; the needs of all. To do this is to participate in the very life of God and it is something much 'larger' than us. I think there are passages in Paul which imply this too.
'Sing psalms and songs all of the time,' I think he says somewhere (eldad can find it for me). There will be times when that will feel like an onerous and dull routine until we break through the other side into a different understanding.
When you talk about 'routine' I am put in mind of Luther's old argument against the monastic way of prayer. Brought up as a 'protestant' (I am still one in so many ways) it is something that has troubled me all my life. After struggling against the notion of 'routine' prayer for decades I finally realised that I could not do without it. My own 'fluid' life of prayer is too personal, too whimsical to last. My flimsy spiritual life was the 'seed that fell upon the path' - choked again and again by 'daily cares'. [There is always something needs doing and God can wait a few minutes can't he?] For me constant recourse to God is not a routine but a delight and it has taken me a lifetime to discover this.
Forgive me for pouncing on your post in this way but I make no bones about saying that the loss of faith in the 'monastic' way of regular prayer and an over-reliance on personally inspired prayer is the greatest tragedy that has befallen the church since the reformation.