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Habits as Liturgies

Writer's picture: Angelique KnaupAngelique Knaup

(A talk from the 2024 Alveary Grove Winter Retreat)


St Cecilia (1606) by Guido Reni
St. Cecilia by Guido Reni

A Prayer


“Holy Spirit: because of my union with Christ, you dwell within me. Yet I confess that I still live according to the flesh. I do not live in conscious dependence upon you. I do not walk in vital communion with you. I am self-reliant and self-trusting, more defined by this age than by the age to come. Forgive me, Gracious Father, for neglecting the gift of your Spirit. Today, fill me afresh with the Spirit’s presence. Revive my soul. Renew my zeal. Release your power in me, for the glory of Your name.”

Daily Liturgy Podcast


A Beautiful Inheritance


The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot.


The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;


indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

— Psalm 16:5-6 (ESV)


Martha And Mary


"Now, as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her."

— Luke 10:38-42 (ESV)


Jesus with Mary and Martha
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Johannes Vermeer

Am I like Martha or Mary? I say I believe that ‘the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places,’ that I have a ‘beautiful inheritance,' and that I have ‘chosen the good portion.' Yet, often, I find myself behaving as if I don’t.


Like Martha, I’m often distracted by and preoccupied with the things of this world. In my busyness, I tend to be anxious and troubled about a lot. Sigh; even in my quiet time, I’m frequently bombarded with busy thoughts.


Telos: Our Ultimate Purpose


In the Gospel of Matthew we read:

“And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

— Matthew 22: 35-39


The Westminster Shorter Catechism says, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”


Surely loving, glorifying, and enjoying the Lord should be our ultimate purpose—our ‘telos,' as the Greeks would say. Why do we get so caught up in being busy that we forget it?


Doing For Doings’ Sake


C. S. Lewis spoke particularly about women’s tendency to busyness:

“Don’t be too easily convinced that God really wants you to do all sorts of work you needn’t do. Each must do his duty ‘in that state of life to which God has called him.’ Remember that a belief in the virtues of doing for doing’s sake is characteristically feminine, characteristically American [and I would say, Western], and characteristically modern: so that three veils may divide you from the correct view! There can be intemperance in work just as in drink. What feels like zeal may be only fidgets or even the flattering of one’s self-importance. As MacDonald says ‘In holy things may be unholy greed.' And by doing what ‘one’s station and its duties’ does not demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand and so commit some injustice. Just you give Mary a little chance as well as Martha!”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady


Ouch! Lewis asks that we examine our reasons for doing the things we do. Are we doing stuff just to be busy? Do we suffer from fidgets? Or are we just indulging in our self- importance? He says that we should try giving Mary and Martha a chance.


A Contradiction


Was Martha doing for doing’s sake? Did the work in their home need to be done just then, or was she worried about nothing? I wonder if Martha was just a tad inflated with her self- importance if the work was necessary. How often do we play the martyr and judge those who aren’t as busy as ourselves? In either case, Martha committed an injustice to Christ and Mary. God made us human beings, not human doings after all. Her affections were misdirected!


I bet, though, that Martha would have unhesitatingly sworn that she loved Jesus more than the work she was doing. And as Sarah said in her talk, indeed, her love for him would have led her to have a loving attitude. There seems to have been a disconnect somewhere. Martha’s head was saying one thing, but her actions clearly said something else!


Let’s look at someone else who experienced a similar conflict and contradiction.


Think One Thing, Do Another


Justin Whitmel Earley was a missionary before he studied to be a highly driven corporate lawyer. In his book The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction, he laments his conversion from being a young missionary to becoming a medicating lawyer who regularly took pills and a few drinks to be able to sleep. His body was failing him. How did that happen? He writes:


“Answering this question was not easy at all. It was a very long and difficult road. I now see that my body had finally become converted to the anxiety and busyness I’d worshiped through my habits and routines. All the years of a schedule built on going nonstop to try to earn my place in the world had finally rubbed off on my heart. My head said one thing, that God loves me no matter what I do, but my habits said another, that I’d better keep striving in order to stay loved. In the end, I started to believe my habits — mind, body, and soul.” 


— Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction


Justin’s mind said one thing, but his actions, habits, and routines said another! His “life was an ode to the worship of omniscience, omnipresence, and limitlessness. No wonder [his] body rebelled”.

— Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction


Giant Bobbleheads


The French philosopher René Descartes is famous for saying, “I think, therefore I am.” Our modern translation of Descartes’s axiom is “I am what I think.” But is this true?


In his book You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, James K. A. Smith laments that we moderns have been duped into believing we are primarily thinking beings. Smith paints a picture of us as “giant bobblehead dolls: with humungous heads and itty-bitty, unimportant bodies.” The mind is our “mission control.”


Our thinking leads us to assume that we primarily learn to know God by acquiring more information through the scriptures. In Smith’s words, we believe that “serious discipleship is just discipleship of the mind.” It’s true, of course, we ought to delight in the law of the Lord (Psalm 1:2), to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2), and to take every thought captive to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). But if our focus is narrowed down into just filling our minds with knowledge, we run the risk of convincing ourselves that we can think our way into holiness. Smith says that: “If “you are what you think,” then filling your thinking organ with Bible verses should translate into Christlike character, right? If “you are what you think,” then changing what you think should change who you are, right? Right?”


— James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit


Was Descartes Wrong?


We think that we love God with all our minds, but do we love Him with all our hearts and with all our souls? Both Martha and Justin honestly thought that God was their first love, yet somehow, that thinking did not influence their actions. Why?


Smith then asks us the real question:

“What if ... you aren’t just a thinking thing? ... What if Descartes was wrong, and we’ve been hoodwinked into seeing ourselves as thinking things? What if we aren’t first and foremost “thinkers”? Then the problem isn’t just our individual resolve or our lack of knowledge.”


— James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit


This Is Water


The answer? Both Smith and Justin believe that it is in the habits that we pursue. We are, first and foremost, creatures of habit! Justin writes:

“[B]ecause our unconscious choices form us just as much, if not more than, our conscious ones, we can become formed in patterns that we would never consciously choose if we were aware of them. This is the difference between what we call education and formation. Education is what you learn and know — things you are taught. Formation is what you practice and do — things that are caught. The most important things in life, of course, are caught, not taught, and formation is largely about all the unseen habits.”

— Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction


The problem is that we aren’t aware of the habits that are forming us.


Japanese print of trouts in a stream
River Trouts in Stream by Utagawa Hiroshige

On May 21, 2005, David Foster Wallace gave his famous “This Is Water” graduation address at Kenyon College. It began with this little story:

“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”


As he put it, the point is that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” Our habits are one of those invisible realities: We all live according to a set of habits that are shaping most of our lives, whether we choose to think so or not.


Habits As Liturgies


Justin continues:

“This is why to fully understand habits you must think of habits as liturgies. A liturgy is a pattern of words or actions repeated regularly as a way of worship. The goal of a liturgy is for the participant to be formed in a certain way. For example, I say the Lord’s Prayer every night with my sons because I want the words of Jesus’ prayer to sink down into their bones. I want that prayer to form the contours of their lives.


"Notice how similar the definition of liturgy is to the definition of habit. They’re both something repeated over and over, which forms you; the only difference is that a liturgy admits that it’s an act of worship. Calling habits liturgies may seem odd, but we need language to emphasize the non-neutrality of our day-to-day routines. Our habits often obscure what we’re really worshiping, but that doesn’t mean we’re not worshiping something. The question is, what are we worshiping?”


— Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction


That’s a good question: what are we worshiping through our habits/liturgies? Omniscience, omnipresence, limitlessness?


The Heart Follows Habit


Our habits don’t just underlie our thinking, they form us spiritually. Justin says:

“When our heads go one way but our habits go another, guess which way the heart follows? The heart always follows the habit.”


— Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction


In turn, our heart’s desires also form our habits (and vice versa). It’s a circle. Smith quotes Geoff Dyer:

“‘Your deepest desire, is the one manifested by your daily life and habits.’ This is because our action — our doing — bubbles up from our loves, which... are habits we’ve acquired through the practices we’re immersed in... our ... practices [are] liturgies — as habit- forming, love-shaping rituals that get hold of our hearts and aim our loves...[O]ur loves and imaginations are conscripted by all sorts of liturgies that are loaded with a vision of the good life.”


— James K. A. Smith, You are What you Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit


Smith instructs us to:

“[T]hink of these liturgies as calibration technologies: they bend the needle of our hearts. But when such liturgies are disordered, aimed at rival kingdoms, they are pointing us away from our ... [true] north in Christ. Our loves and longings are steered wrong, not because we’ve been hoodwinked by bad ideas, but because we’ve been immersed in de-formative liturgies and not realized it. As a result, we absorb a very different Story about the telos [ultimate purpose] of being human and the norms for flourishing. We start to live toward a rival understanding of the good life... we are often immersed in, cultural practices that covertly capture our loves and longings, miscalibrating them, orienting us to rival versions of the good life.”

— James K. A. Smith, You are What you Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit


Only One Thing Is Necessary


In other words, our habits — our liturgies — carry us towards or away from our telos and the ultimate Story of our identity and purpose! As James put it:

“Liturgy is the way we learn to “put on” Christ (Colossians 3:12–16).”


— James K. A. Smith, You are What you Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit


St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo

The North African theologian and philosopher St. Augustine is famously quoted as saying,

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Martha’s heart was restless because of its preoccupations, while Mary rested because her heart was pointed towards Christ, her true north.


I long to be more like Mary, who was occupied with the ‘one thing [that] is necessary.’ She chose her time with Jesus, her ‘beautiful inheritance.’ Mind you, I don’t believe she was lazy, she just knew how to order her days (her habits/liturgies) because her first and foremost love was Christ.


Rival Liturgies (Bad Habits)


On the other hand, Martha and Justin were immersed in rival liturgies of busyness, stress, and anxiety that covertly captured their loves and longings. Many rival habits/liturgies can lead us astray.


An example of a habit that could do this to us is our use of devices and the internet. We tend to worry about them in terms of content, but we should look at the rituals that tie us to them throughout the day instead. Are they formational liturgies loaded with a self-centred purpose?


In her book Liturgy of the Ordinary, Tish Harrison Warren writes about how technology filled ‘every empty moment’ in her day. She fed on a ‘near-constant stream of news, entertainment, stimulation, likes, and retweets’ and had built a ‘habit of steady resistance to and dread of boredom.’


How did she break this bad habit? By banishing her phone from her bedroom! Rather than waking up and instantly ‘looking for all good things to come from a glowing screen,' she woke up to quiet time with Jesus, searching for the light of His face and learning that He is the ‘maker and giver of all good things.’ This little habit/liturgy of putting Christ first in her day started recalibrating her love. A small act of resistance spilt over into the rest of her day. It was how she guarded her heart with all vigilance, knowing that from it flows the springs of life (Proverbs 4:23).


What Can We Do?


So, we think that loving the Lord is our ultimate end (telos), but how do we start embodying this love in our every day/workaday lives? How do we begin the process of re- forming our habits, and re-orienting our heart’s desires — our loves — towards a vision of the good life? How do we learn to give Mary a chance?


We start by first learning to examine our habits.


A Daily Examen


Smith says that:

“[O]nce you realize that we are not just thinking things but creatures of habit, you’ll then realize that temptation isn’t just about bad ideas or wrong decisions; it’s often a factor of de-formation and wrongly ordered habits. In other words, our sins aren’t just discrete, wrong actions and bad decisions; they reflect vices. And overcoming them requires more than just knowledge; it requires rehabituation, a re-formation of our loves. One place to start is simply to become aware of the everyday liturgies in your life. Once you’ve... begun to read your daily rhythms through a liturgical lens, you’re then in a place to undertake a kind of liturgical audit of your life. You could think of this as a macro version of the Daily Examen, a spiritual practice inherited from St. Ignatius of Loyola. The Examen is a practice for paying attention to your life: reflect on God’s presence; review your day in a spirit of gratitude; become aware of your emotions before God; pray over one feature of your day; and then intentionally look forward to tomorrow.


Imagine a Liturgical Examen to go along with this: Find time to pause for reflection on the rituals and rhythms of your life. This could even be the focus of an annual retreat. Look at your daily, weekly, monthly, and annual routines. What are the things you do that do something to you? What are the secular liturgies in your life? What vision of the good life is carried in those liturgies? What Story is embedded in those cultural practices? What kind of person do they want you to become? To what kingdom are these rituals aimed?” 


— James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit


Ordo Amoris: Think On These Things — Then Practice Them!


We can’t be half-hearted about any of this either. St. Augustine looks at Matthew 22 and observes:

“When it says, [You shall love the Lord your God with] ‘all your heart, all your soul, all your mind’, it leaves no part of our life free from this obligation, no part free as it were to back out and enjoy some other thing; any other object of love that enters the mind should be swept towards the same destination as that to which the whole flood of our love is directed.”


— St. Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Teaching


We must order our desires by learning to love what is true, good, and beautiful. The apostle Paul tells us:

"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me — practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you."

— Philippians 4:8-9 (ESV)


Paul is saying that we must not only think about these things but also put them into practice! We embody them in our habits/liturgies. Ordering our desires and affections and practising the vision of the good life will lead us to true rest and peace in Christ. This is what the term Ordo-Amoris means.


What Are Some Habits That Can Orientate Us Towards Our Ultimate Purpose?


The Habit of Worship:


Worship reforms our desires and recalibrates our hearts toward the Lord. It restor(i)es¹ us. Let your every day be formed by the worship of the one true God.


The Habit of Observing the Sabbath:


When we observe the Sabbath, gather with other believers, worship the Lord with song and praise, pray, read scripture, and observe the Lord’s supper, we are doing practical things that have deep spiritual impact and meaning if we allow them too.


The Habit of Kneeling Prayer Three Times a Day


Prayers are a way for us to frame our days in love. And kneeling when we pray is a great example of an embodied habit. When we kneel, we stop what we are doing and punctuate our day with embodied worship. As Justin puts it: 
“I need something physical to mark the moment for my slippery mind.”

— Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction


The Habit of Scripture Before Phone



Remember, steeping ourselves in God’s Word ignites our imaginations with a vision of the good life. Justin says:

“Refusing to check the phone until after reading a passage of Scripture is a way of replacing the question “What do I need to do today?” with a better one, “Who am I and who am I becoming?” We have no stable identity outside of Jesus. Daily immersion in the Scriptures resists the anxiety of emails, the anger of news, and the envy of social media. Instead it forms us daily in our true identity as children of the King, dearly loved.”


— Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction


The Habit of One Hour With Phone Off


Switch off notifications for an hour a day to pursue silence. Turn your devices off when you’re with friends and family. Justin is right when he says:

“Attention is our precious commodity. Our life is defined by what we pay attention to. This means our life is defined by which of the many cries for our attention we heed. If we’re going to take that call seriously, we have to acknowledge that our phones are carefully designed to attract our attention and sell it to advertisers...

"We don’t mean to live lives of absence, but without meaningful habits of resistance, smartphones are impossible not to look at. If we do nothing, we’re sure to live a life of fractured presence. And that’s not much of a life at all, because presence is the essence of life itself.”


— Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction


(The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place, by Andy Crouch, is an excellent book to read on the use of technology)


Partnering With The Holy Spirit


“It rests with us to form habits of the good life in thought, feeling, and action, and even in spiritual things. We cannot make ourselves ‘good’; but in this way, we can partner with the Holy Spirit to lay paths for the good life in the very substance of the brain. Through a relationship with Him we can hear the voice of God; paths will form where the Lord God may walk in the cool of the evening.” 


— Charlotte Mason, Volume 5: Formation of Character (rephrased for parents)


We are required to have the habits of the good life in thought, feeling, action, and spiritual things. Let us be diligent in partnering with the Holy Spirit in pursuing such habits of re- calibration and re-formation: habits that remind us to find true rest in Father God and habits that encourage us to treat our neighbours with love, patience, and kindness (1 Corinthians 13:4-7).


 

¹James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

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