What are the habits that you prioritize in your life? Your habits say a lot about who you are. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. Smith is such a helpful read as we all consider the focus of our mind’s attention and heart’s affection. I highlighted several things while reading and have posted those notes below:
- “And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ–to the glory and praise of God.” Philippians 1:9-11 p. 6
- “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” – Augustine p. 8
- To be human is to have a heart. You can’t not love. So the question isn’t whether you will love something as ultimate; the question is what you will love as ultimate. And you are what you love. p. 10
- “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your god.” – Martin Luther p. 23
- If the orienteering metaphor of the heart-as-compass doesn’t quite resonate with you, consider another, suggested by the theologian-troubadour Bruce Springsteen: “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.” p. 58
- You can’t just think your way to new hungers. Such rehabituation requires a whole new set of practices. p. 61
- Discipleship is a kind of immigration, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Colossians 1:13). In Christ we are given a heavenly passport; in his body we learn how to live like “locals” of his kingdom. 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 (Philippians 3:20). p. 66
- Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts. p. 77
- To be conformed to the image of his Son is not only to think God’s thoughts after him but to desire what God desires. That requires the recalibration of our heart-habits and the recapturing of our imagination, which happens when God’s Word becomes the orienting center of our social imaginary, shaping our very perception of things before we even think about them. p. 85
- Christian worship invites a congregation into a story with four chapters: gathering, listening, communing, and sending. p. 96
- If the biblical narrative of God’s redemption were just information we needed to know, the Lord could have simply given us a book and a whole lot of homework. But since the ascension of Christ, the people of God have been called to gather as a body around the Word and the Lord’s Table, to pray and sing, to confess and give thanks, to lift up our hearts so they can be taken up and re-formed by the formative grace of God that is carried in the rites of Christian worship. Something is going on in the worship of the gathered/called congregation beyond simply the dissemination of information. p. 107
- What if education weren’t first and foremost about what we know but about what we love? p. 138
- If young people are always and only gathered with and by themselves, how will they learn from exemplars, those model saints in the local congregation who have lived a lifetime with Jesus? p. 145
- Following the example of “putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others”…If I am going to be a teacher of virtue, I need to be a virtuous teacher. If I hope to invite students into a formative educational project, then I, too, need to relinquish any myth of independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency and recognize that my own formation is never final. Virtue is not a one-time accomplishment; it requires a maintenance program. So how can educators of virtue be reformed and transformed? What practices can sustain such a lofty pedagogical project? p. 161
- Communal practices for reforming the formers:
- Eat together
- Pray together
- Sing together
- Think and read together p. 163
- Teachers of virtue are not born, they are formed. They are not “produced” by a diploma or merely credentialed by a certificate; they are shaped by immersion in practices that bend their loves and longing toward Christ and his coming kingdom. In short, becoming a teacher of virtue takes practice. p. 163