You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“To do by ‘feel’ what cannot be done by regular conscious thought”: that’s not a bad description of the goal of discipleship. To conform to the image of the Son is to have so absorbed the gospel as a “kinesthetic sense,” a know-how you now carry in your bones, that you do by “feel” what cannot be done by conscious thought.

The story, while quaint, gets at an important truth: too often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary.

Such an immigration to a new kingdom isn’t just a matter of being teleported to a different realm; we need to be acclimated to a new way of life, learn a new language, acquire new habits—and unlearn the habits of that rival dominion. Christian worship is our enculturation as citizens of heaven, subjects of kingdom come (Phil. 3:20).

The biblical vision refuses any dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural. Rather, as Henri de Lubac put it, humanity is created with a natural desire for the supernatural, and the supernatural operations of grace enable us to realize the natural ends for which we were created.

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.”

we act toward what we long for, and if we long for what has captured our imagination, then re-formative Christian worship needs to capture our imagination. That means 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 tha

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry captures this well: “If you want to build a ship, 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.”

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

I also believe that for the sake of discipleship it is crucial to immerse oneself in a community of practice that exhibits the reformative potential we’ve been describing. Your heart is at stake.

Part of the claim of the early Christians, in fact, was that in and through Jesus they had discovered both a totally different way of being human and a way which scooped up the best that ancient wisdom had to offer and placed it in a framework where it could, at last, make sense.