You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

education is an inherently formational project, not just an informational endeavor.

I know my way around because the knowledge I have is what David Foster Wallace called “kinesthetic”: it’s know-how that I carry in my bones. It’s a knowledge that I caught, that I learned by doing. I didn’t even realize I was learning.

Even mourning takes practice: resisting the distractions that insulate us from facing up to the tragedy of the world in which we find ourselves, we need to teach our children to mourn for neighbors who bear the brunt of injustice, even though we grieve as those with hope (1 Thess. 4:13). Sometimes in this fallen world the best thing we can do is te

You might also consider making the family calendar on the side of the fridge a liturgical calendar like the Salt of the Earth calendar produced by the University Hill United Church in Vancouver, British Columbia (see www.thechristiancalendar.com) or the St. James Calendar of the Christian Year produced by the Fellowship of St. James (see www.fsj.or

the Building Cathedrals blog, which brings together the wisdom of seven Catholic women, all graduates of Princeton University, who are, as they put it, “seeking to build our families just as the architects of the great cathedrals built their detailed masterpieces: day by day, stone by stone, with attention to details that only He will see.”

All of this demands a kind of Sabbath slowdown in the midst of our otherwise “efficient” and “productive” lives.30 To grow a garden is to inhabit a different economics.

Our households—our “little kingdoms”—need to be nourished by constant recentering in the body of Christ. Week after week we bring our little kingdoms into the kingdom of God. Communal, congregational worship locates the family in the sweep of God’s story and in the wider web of the people of God.

This stage culminates in the couple’s crowning, in which they are literally crowned as servant and handmaid of God “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” This illustrates, as Schmemann puts it, that “each family is indeed a kingdom, a little church, and therefore a sacrament of and a way to the Kingdom.”23 Their marria

In movies and magazines the “icon” of marriage is always a youthful couple. But once, in the light and warmth of an autumn afternoon, this writer saw on the bench of a public square, in a poor Parisian suburb, an old and poor couple. They were sitting hand in hand, in silence, enjoying the pale light, the last warmth of the season. In silence: all