Reflections on You Are What You Love

I could practically smell the aroma of Mom’s favorite chicken casserole as I scanned my careful pre-married handwriting on the recipe card I’d copied before setting up my own household way back in 1985. The ink was splattered with the evidence of many makings before the recipe had somehow slipped out of use. Having rediscovered it, I couldn’t wait to make it again. However, when the anticipated first forkful finally arrived in my mouth, I could hardly eat it. It was so salty! I remember how difficult it had seemed back when the dietary experts first cautioned us to cut back on salt. How bland everything tasted. How I craved that flavor. But over the years, I must have grown accustomed to its absence. Not only had I ceased to crave it—when I finally (accidentally) got it—I could no longer eat it. Habit had formed my love. 

Reading You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. Smith gave me ways to identify and talk about some of the formative practices I’ve experienced in my personal and professional life. One of Smith's lines that has become part of my repertoire is that we don’t just do things—the things we do also do things to us. As I eat less salt, I become a person who appreciates other flavors. As I blog, I become a more reflective teacher. As my students read and write, they take on the identity of readers and writers. And, as we will be hearing a lot about this month of November, as we practice gratitude, we become more grateful people. (See "Writing My Way into Gratitude," one of my blogs from last November.)

Our habits form our loves, and our loves also form our habits. This might be our more usual thinking—I love reading, so I read—but note 2 things: not only can we re-form our loves by re-forming habits, but also what we really love may not be what we think we love. Our habits give us away. I may say, “I love getting out in nature,” but if I never get around to it, there are other things I actually love more. Or when we say, “I’d give anything to play the piano [or tennis, or what have you] like that,” but we wouldn’t really, otherwise we’d have given the hours of daily practice for years that the subject in question has. The good news is the cycle of love producing habit strengthening love is susceptible to intervention at either stroke. It is possible to analyze what our loves are given our current habits, to articulate what we want to love instead, and to put ourselves in commitments and communities that will help us form the habits that will form those loves.

Where the rubber hits the road with teaching: we articulate what we want our students to love, design the commitments and community that will help form the habits that will form those loves, and—here’s the big thing—become ourselves the model, the first member of that community that we will invite students into. For me as an English teacher in a Christian school, I want my students to love language and skillfully wielding it in beautiful, just, peaceful, powerful, compassionate ways, that honor its Creator, His creation, and His image bearers. We do this by reading, listening, thinking, speaking, and writing together as we learn about the world.

One habit that has formed me as a teacher is the discipline of the novels and themes I’ve taught every year in 10th grade world lit: Cry, the Beloved Country and how we build and break shalom, Night and how human dignity is disregarded, After Dark and the importance of empathy, A Doll’s House and how identity is formed, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and our search for love. There are quotes, concepts, and background information that spring to mind so frequently I have to squelch them in non-English-teachery company or I may be suspected as a bit obsessive. Warning: this is the spiritual power of habit—the habit of re-reading significant literature.

Last year I began a practice of a few minutes of centering my mind before God before daily Scripture reading. I would breathe in and out deeply and slowly as I repeated the prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” At a doctor visit, I sat down in front of the automatic blood pressure cuff, inserted my right arm, and took a deep, relaxing breath as the cuff tightened. Suddenly the words sprang unbidden into my mind, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I nearly laughed out loud at the spiritual power of habit to prompt prayer during routine blood pressure measurement!