“While some of our habits are acquired by choosing to engage in certain practices (e.g., signing up for drivers’ ed. or registering for piano lessons), many are acquired without our knowing it. And this might happen especially when we are unaware of it. If we are inattentive to the formative role of practices, or if we treat some practices as thin when they are thick, then we will be inattentive to all the ways that such practices unwittingly and unintentionally become automated. We will fail to recognize that they are forming in us habits and desires, oriented to particular ends that function to draw us toward those ends at an affective, unconscious level such that we become certain kinds of people without even being aware of it.
Tag: James K.A. Smith
Want to know what sort of person you’re becoming? Look at the rituals in your life. “The way to the heart is through the body…” JKA Smith
— Ryan Anderson (@akaRyanAnderson) September 11, 2016
Having read James K.A. Smith’s book You Are What You Love, this quote, that the way to the heart is through the body, has been on my mind after seeing it in the tweet above. It sums up a very vital point: the habits and patterns in your life, what you’re filling your mind with via the eye and ear on a habitual basis, what activities you participate in, what you read, are not something you merely control, external to you, but rather, they are actually forming you. They are shaping the direction of your life, your heart.
Brian Davis, the pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church, a PCA church plant in Fort Worth that is starting up in August (that our family will be attending :)), recommended a couple of books that look really interesting on spiritual formation: Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom by James K.A. Smith.