You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

And so on, and so on. You will begin to appreciate that all sorts of things we do are, when seen in this light, doing something to us. It’s not just the messages or ideas or information being disseminated by these cultural institutions that have import for discipleship; it is the very form of the practices themselves, their liturgical power to (de)

In short, if you are what you love, and love is a habit, then discipleship is a rehabituation of your loves.

when the shopping excursion is over and all the bags are brought into the house as the spoils of our adventure, we find that we’ve come back to the same old “real world” we left.

The sorts of operations Wilson says are delegated to the unconscious—setting goals, assessing a situation, initiating action—include the “operations” of desire, the “devices of our heart,” as the Book of Common Prayer puts it. This is because character and the virtues are also “located” on this unconscious register.

I also believe that for the sake of discipleship it is crucial to immerse oneself in a community of practice that exhibits the reformative potential we’ve been describing. Your heart is at stake.

Indeed, we could say that human beings are fundamentally erotic creatures. Unfortunately—and for understandable reasons—the word “erotic” carries a lot of negative connotations in our pornographied culture. Thus Christians tend to be allergic to eros (and often set up stark contrasts between eros and agape, the latter of which we hallow as “Christi

In a similar way, the Lord knows that we are creatures of habit; he created us this way. God knows that we are animated by hungers we aren’t always aware of, that our wants and cravings are inscribed in us by habit-forming practices that teach us to want.

Our culture often sells us faulty, fantastical maps of “the good life” that paint alluring pictures that draw us toward them. All too often we stake the expedition of our lives on them, setting sail toward them with every sheet hoisted. And we do so without thinking about it because these maps work on our imagination, not our intellect. It’s not un

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry captures this well: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”