You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

by James K.A. Smith

discipleship is more a matter of hungering and thirsting than of knowing and believing. Jesus’s command to follow him is a command to align our loves and longings with his—to want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God and crave a world where he is all in all—a vision encapsulated by the shorthand “the kingdom of God.”

We aren’t really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties. Instead some panoramic tableau of what looks like flourishing has an alluring power that attracts us, drawing us toward it, and we thus live and work toward that goal. We get pulled into a way of life that seems to be the way to arrive in that world. Such a telos works on us, not by convincing the intellect, but by allure.

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

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.

While the mall touts itself as a “third place” for friendship, it breeds human interaction that is, at root, a form of competition. We have to unlearn the habits of consumerism in order to learn how to be friends.

You won’t be liberated from deformation by new information. God doesn’t deliver us from the deformative habit-forming power of tactile rival liturgies by merely giving us a book. Instead, he invites us into a different embodied liturgy that not only is suffused by the biblical story but also, via those practices, inscribes the story into our hearts as our erotic calibration, bending the needle of our loves toward Christ,

We are called to be characters in this story, to play the role of God’s image bearers who care for and cultivate God’s creation, to the praise of his glory. To learn this role is to become what we were made to be. This is not playacting or pretending: it is the role we were born to play. In becoming these characters, we become ourselves.

Christian worship needs to meet us as aesthetic creatures who are moved more than we are convinced. Our imaginations are aesthetic organs. Our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images. We tap our existential feet to the rhythm of imaginative drums.

Worship that restores our loves will be worship that restor(i)es our imagination.