You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Some of us are interested in religious studies because we are interested in people. People do religious things; they symbolize and ritualize their lives and desire to be in a community. What piqued my interest in shopping malls initially was their concrete expressions of all three of these religious impulses. Quadrilateral architecture, calendrical

Pastors need to be ethnographers of the everyday, helping parishioners see their own environment as one that is formative, and all too often deformative. The pastor will sometimes be like the old fish in Wallace’s parable, regularly asking us, “How’s the water?” Eventually we learn: “Oh, this is water.”

As perilous ice quickly surrounded the ship, Sides recounts, the team had to “shed its organizing ideas, in all their unfounded romance, and to replace them with a reckoning of the way the Arctic truly is.”a

“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…

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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.

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.

Such an intellectualist model of the human person—one that reduces us to mere intellect—assumes that learning (and hence discipleship) is primarily a matter of depositing ideas and beliefs into mind-containers.

Our desires are caught more than they are taught.

The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner.

If being a disciple is being a learner and follower of Jesus, then a lot hinges on what you think “learning” is. And what you think learning is hinges on what you think human beings are. In other words, your understanding of discipleship will reflect a set of working assumptions about the very nature of human beings, even if you’ve never asked your