The biblical vision refuses any dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural. Rather, as Henri de Lubac put it, humanity is created with a natural desire for the supernatural, and the supernatural operations of grace enable us to realize the natural ends for which we were created.

This romantic picture is already enacted in the honeymoon: to kindle your marriage, you need to “get away,” retreat from the drudgery of the workaday world (which is, apparently, matrimonial poison). For your marriage to last, according to this logic, you’ll have to keep planning “date nights” and romantic escapes for just the two of you, to “keep

The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

We willingly embrace repetition as a good in all kinds of other sectors of our life—to hone our golf swing, our piano prowess, and our mathematical abilities, for example. If the sovereign Lord has created us as creatures of habit, why should we think repetition is inimical to our spiritual growth?

“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”3 Packed into this one line is wisdom that should radically change how we approach worship, discipleship, and Christian formation.

How do we learn to be consumerists? Not because someone comes along and offers an argument for why stuff will make me happy. I don’t think my way into consumerism. Rather, I’m covertly conscripted into a way of life because I have been formed by cultural practices that are nothing less than secular liturgies.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”15

In particular, the Reformers were critical of worship practices that had been effectively “naturalized”—forms of worship that construed liturgical practices as operations of merely human effort.

“Your deepest desire,” he observes, “is the one manifested by your daily life and habits.”