You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

by James K.A. Smith

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.

Now we are in a place to see the connection: we clothe ourselves in Christ’s love (vv. 12–14) and “put on” the virtue of love by letting the word of Christ dwell in us richly; by teaching and admonishing one another; by singing psalms, hymns, and songs of the Spirit. The practices of Christian worship train our love—they are practice for the coming kingdom, habituating us as citizens of the kingdom of God.

Christian worship, we should recognize, is essentially a counterformation to those rival liturgies

What do you want? That, we’ve seen, is the question.

you might not love what you think.

Here we are. This is the place where you can have what you want. Who wants to go first?

What if the desires they are conscious of—the one’s they’ve “chosen,” as it were—are not their innermost longings, their deepest wish? What if, in some sense, their deepest longings are humming under their consciousness unawares?

sometimes a man doesn’t want to do what a man thinks he wants to do.”

the formation of my loves and desires can be happening “under the hood” of consciousness.

This is why the people of God are called to regularly confess their sins.

The practices of Christian worship are a tangible, practiced, re-formative way to address this tension and gap.

And all of a sudden, as we look back on all those fantasies about Angela writhing in rose petals, we remember: it was Carolyn who so tenderly cared for the American Beauties in her garden. And, with Lester, we start to ask ourselves: Is this really what I want?

it is also the case that the process of habituation can be unconscious and covert.

how we think about discipleship depends on how we understand the nature of the human person. We could also say that every approach to discipleship implicitly includes a set of assumptions about how human behavior is generated.

we make our way in the world by means of under-the-radar intuition and attunement,

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.”

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

At one point Wilson wagers that only about 5 percent of what we do in a given day is the outcome of conscious, deliberate choices we make, processed by that snowball on the tip of the iceberg that is human consciousness.

The language of automaticity isn’t meant to reduce us to machines or robots;

And you don’t remember driving home! How can that be? Because over time, the habits required to drive—to navigate your way through the world—have been repeated over and over again so often that they have seeped into your unconscious and become automaticities.

The habits we’ve acquired shape how we perceive the world, which in turn disposes us to act in certain ways.

It is in this sense that “character is destiny”: your character is the web of dispositions you’ve acquired (virtues and vices) that work as automaticities, disposing you to act in certain ways.

there can be all sorts of automating going on that we do not choose and of which we are not aware but that nevertheless happen because we are regularly immersed in environments loaded with such formative rituals.

you could be worshiping other gods without even knowing it.

You can learn to love a telos unconsciously, in two senses. On the one hand, because your loves are habits, they are mostly operative under the hood, below the surface. So your loves are unconscious even though they are learned. On the other hand, you can also learn unconsciously—that is, the training and aiming and directing of your loves can be happening without your awareness precisely because you don’t recognize what’s at stake in your cultural immersion.

We need to become aware of our immersions.

To the contrary, our loves and imaginations are conscripted by all sorts of liturgies

Christian discipleship that is going to be intentional and formative needs to be attentive to all the rival formations we are immersed in.

we need to become aware of the whole person.

Second, we will then see cultural practices as liturgies—and hopefully wake up to their (de)formative power.

Interestingly, Scripture has a way of doing this: it’s called “apocalyptic” literature.

The point of apocalyptic literature is not prediction but unmasking—unveiling the realities around us for what they really are.

Apocalyptic literature invites us to lean over and get a new perspective that lets us see through the blinders

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.

The mall is a religious site, not because it is theological but because it is liturgical.

This temple—like countless others now emerging around the world—offers a rich, embodied visual mode of evangelism that attracts us. This is a gospel whose power is beauty, which speaks to our deepest desires. It compels us to come, not through dire moralisms, but rather with a winsome invitation to share in this envisioned good life.

Having a sense of our need, we come looking, not sure what for, but expectant, knowing that what we need must be here.

At other times our worship is intentional, directed, and resolute:

When invited to worship here, we are not only invited to give; we are invited to take. We don’t leave this transformative experience with just good feeling or pious generalities, but rather with something concrete and tangible—with

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.

You will begin to appreciate that all sorts of things we do are, when seen in this light, doing something to us.

Liturgies work affectively and aesthetically—they grab hold of our guts through the power of image, story, and metaphor. That’s why the most powerful liturgies are attuned to our embodiment; they speak to our senses; they get under our skin.

Our loves and longings are steered wrong, not because we’ve been hoodwinked by bad ideas, but because we’ve been immersed in de-formative liturgies and not realized it.

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

What is covertly communicated to us is the disconnect and difference between their lives and our own life, which often doesn’t look or feel nearly as chipper and fulfilled as the lives of the people in these images do.

So at the same time that these “perfect” images, these icons of happiness, are subliminally telling me what’s wrong with myself, they are also valorizing ideals that run counter to shalom—

However, what sort of vision of human relationships is implicit in the rituals of the market?

As a result, we not only judge ourselves against that standard, but we fall into the habit of evaluating others by these same standards.

First, we’ve implicitly evaluated others vis-à-vis ourselves and then triangulated this against the ideals we’ve absorbed from the mall’s evangelism. Second, in doing so, we’ve kept a running score in our head:

We have to unlearn the habits of consumerism in order to learn how to be friends.