Home > Work > You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit
21 " But once you realize that we are not just thinking things but creatures of habit, you’ll then realize that temptation isn’t just about bad ideas or wrong decisions; it’s often a factor of de-formation and wrongly ordered habits. In other words, our sins aren’t just discrete, wrong actions and bad decisions; they reflect vices.25 And overcoming them requires more than just knowledge; it requires rehabituation, a re-formation of our loves. One "
― James K.A. Smith , You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit
22 " We often hear of brand loyalty, even brand “devotion.” But do people really worship brands? Is consumerism really such a “liturgical” experience? It may not be as far fetched as you think. In a recent study to consider the effect of “super brands” such as Apple and Facebook, researchers made an intriguing discovery. When they analyzed the brain activity of product fanatics, like members of the Apple cult, they found that “the Apple products are triggering the same bits of [their] brain as religious imagery triggers in a person of faith.”a This is your brain on Apple: it looks like it’s worshiping. "
23 " And when our songs attribute the action of worship to us (“Here I am to worship, here I am to bow down . . .”), then worship is understood as fundamentally an expression of human will, a Pelagian endeavor of self-assertion. "
24 " Our sanctification is more like a Weight Watchers program than listening to a book on tape. "
25 " Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably all these years. "
26 " Things which are not in their intended position are restless. Once they are in their ordered position, they are at rest.9 "
27 " too often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary. "
28 " Your love or desire—aimed at a vision of the good life that shapes how you see the world while also moving and motivating you—is operative on a largely nonconscious level. Your love is a kind of automaticity. That’s why we need to be aware of how it is acquired. "
29 " The body of Christ is that unique community of practice whose members own up to the fact that we don’t always love what we say we do—that the “devices and desires” of our hearts outstrip our best intentions. The practices of Christian worship are a tangible, practiced, re-formative way to address this tension and gap. "
30 " if you are what you love and if love is a virtue, then love is a habit. This means that our most fundamental orientation to the world—the longings and desires that orient us toward some version of the good life—is shaped and configured by imitation and practice. This has important implications for how we approach Christian formation and discipleship. "
31 " We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love. "
32 " Too much of our cultural analysis is rooted in thinking-thingism: we scan culture, listening for “messages,” bent on rooting out “false” teachings. But if we are first and foremost lovers, and if our action is overwhelmingly governed by our unconscious habits, then intellectual threats might not be the most important. Indeed, we could be so fixated on intellectual temptations that we don’t realize our hearts are being liturgically co-opted by rival empires all the while. The point of looking at culture through a liturgical lens is to jolt us into a new recognition of who we are and where we are. "
33 " To be human is to be on a quest. To live is to be embarked on a kind of unconscious journey toward a destination of your dreams. As Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: “You have to wager. It is not up to you, you are already committed.”7 You can’t not bet your life on something. You can’t not be headed somewhere. We live leaning forward, bent on arriving at the place we long for. "
34 " The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our telos—our goal, our end. But the telos we live toward is not something that we primarily know or believe or think about; rather, our telos is what we want, what we long for, what we crave. It is less an ideal that we have ideas about and more a vision of “the good life” that we desire. "
35 " To be human, we could say, is to desire the kingdom—some kingdom. To call it a “kingdom” is to signal that we’re not talking only about some personal, private Eden—some individual nirvana—but that we all live and long for a social vision of what we think society should look like too. That’s why there’s something ultimate about this vision: to be oriented toward some sense of the good life is to pursue some vision of how the world ought to be. "
36 " Thus each household and family does well to take an audit of its daily routines, looking at them through a liturgical lens. What Story is carried in those rhythms? What vision of the good life is carried in those practices? What sorts of people are made by immersion in these cultural liturgies? "
37 " As lovers—as desiring creatures and liturgical animals—our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral. In this respect, ancient wisdom about spiritual disciplines intersects with contemporary psychological insight into consciousness. The result is a picture that should lead us to appreciate the significant role of the unconscious in action and behavior. "
38 " there are no box seats at this table, no reservations for VIPs, no filet mignon for those who can afford it while the rest eat crumbs from their table. The Lord’s Table is a leveling reality in a world of increasing inequalities, an enacted vision of “a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine” (Isa. 25:6). "
39 " often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary. "
40 " Those formed by such liturgies then become the kind of people who pursue and desire that end. So if we are unreflectively immersed in the liturgies of consumerism, we will, over time, “learn” that the end goal of human life is acquisition and consumption. “What is the chief end of man?” the consumerist catechism asks. “To acquire stuff with the illusion that I can enjoy it forever. "