You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

by James K.A. Smith

If you’re serious about following Jesus, you will drink up every opportunity to learn more about God, God’s Word, what he requires of us, and what he desires for his creation.

To recognize the limits of knowledge is not to embrace ignorance. We don’t need less than knowledge; we need more. We need to recognize the power of habit.

the future of the church is ancient: Christian wisdom for a postmodern world can be found in a return to ancient voices who never fell prey to modern reductionism.

You can’t not love.

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.

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.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, succinctly encapsulates the motive power of such allure: “If you want to build a ship,” he counsels, “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.”8

Augustine goes on to unpack the analogy: “My weight is my love,” he says. “Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.” Our orienting loves are like a kind of gravity—carrying us in the direction to which they are weighted.

This means that Spirit-led formation of our loves is a recalibration of the heart, a reorientation of our loves by unlearning all the tacit bearings we’ve absorbed from other cultural practices. We need to recognize how such rituals can be love-shaping practices that form and deform our desires—and then be intentional about countermeasures.

In order to appreciate the spiritual significance of such cultural practices, let’s call these sorts of formative, love-shaping rituals “liturgies.” It’s a bit of an old, churchy word, but I want to both revive and expand it because it crystallizes a final aspect of this model of the human person: to say “you are what you love” is synonymous with saying “you are what you worship.”

We can’t not worship because we can’t not love something as ultimate.

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

Becoming conscious isn’t the only—or even an adequate—solution to the challenge he rightly recognizes. A more holistic response is to intentionally recalibrate the unconscious, to worship well, to immerse ourselves in liturgies that are indexed to the kingdom of God precisely so that even our unconscious desires and longings—the affective, under-the-hood ways we intend the world—are indexed to God and what God wants for his world.

The practices of Christian worship train our love—they are practice for the coming kingdom, habituating us as citizens of the kingdom of God.

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.