You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

love is both habit and hunger, then our tastes and cravings for what’s ultimate will be changed in the same way. Reflection is important—indeed, I hope this book can serve as a catalyst for your thinking about the liturgical formation (and deformation) of your loves. But reflection should propel us into new practices that will reform our hungers by

practices,” not because this is something we accomplish, but because these practices are the “habitations of the Spirit.”7 The practices of prayer and song, preaching and offering, baptism and Communion, are the canoes and boats and helicopters that God graciously sends our way. He meets us where we are, as creatures of habit who are shaped by prac

implicit in those visual icons of success, happiness, pleasure, and fulfillment is a stabbing albeit unarticulated recognition that that’s not me.

Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss, “Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S. Consumption on the Environment,” Scientific American, September 14, 2012, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumption-habits.

And that happens through practices, not propaganda.

You are what you love because you live toward what you want.

This teleological aspect of the human person, coupled with the fundamental centrality of love, generates Augustine’s third insight: because we are made to love the One who made and loves us—“we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19)—we will find “rest” when our loves are rightly ordered to this ultimate end.

In short, what sparkled with the thrill of the new in the mall’s slanted light quickly becomes flat and dull. It’s not working anymore. And yet: to whom else shall we go? So when can we go again?

“Liturgy,” as I’m using the word, is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we’re for. They carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation. To return to our metaphor above, think of these liturgies as calibration technologies: they bend the needle of our hearts.