What Do I Love?
A sort of book review
What do you want?
In his 2016 book You Are What You Love, James K.A. Smith says that we are driven and motivated not by what we know, but by what we love, and that those loves are shaped by our habits and practices.
Loving vs. Knowing
Perhaps the easiest way to explain Smith’s argument is to give an example from my own life.
I’m very recently married, and it’s amazing. However, as those of you who are married know, the first weeks, months, (and God forbid, years?) are full of the interesting challenge of blending schedules, habits, and cultures. This blending business takes a lot of talking. Are we going to do it my way, your way, or meet somewhere in the middle? (In other words, will I be happy, will you be happy, or will neither of us be happy?)
In these discussions it’s easy for me to offer up a long list of logical reasons why my way would be better. Because I always think through everything very carefully, right?
Not really.
I’ve discovered the biggest flaw in my argumentation is that I come up with all of my reasons after I’ve already made up my mind. You see, I first love doing things my way, and then I come up with “logical” reasons to back up my heart’s desires.
And that is part of what Smith is getting at in the first part of his book; we as people are first lovers and then thinkers. More often than not it is our minds that follow our hearts.
This means then that in order to change our loves, we can’t just simply tell ourselves to do it differently; that would only address our thoughts, not our desires. This question of personal transformation is the one that Smith tackles next.
How are our loves shaped?
Smith says that our loves are shaped by our habits. That is, what we do shapes and changes what we love.
Shopping malls are a great example of the love-habit relationship. The moment you step into the door, the mall is trying to make you spend—and become a certain kind of person by spending. Everything from the banners to the architecture of the building is telling you to buy, consume, and worship “stuff.” Messages from signs and advertisements tell you what you need to make you happy. Even the statues (mannequins) “embody for us concrete images of the good life.”1
Thought about in this way, the mall is almost a religious place; you could even say that the advertisements and displays in the mall are an instruction class. It tries to create habits in people that turn them into consumers.
The point Smith is bringing out here is that what we love is formed in us by rituals, habits, and practices. Referencing the shopping mall, he says,
How do we learn to be consumerists? Not because someone comes along and offers an argument for why stuff will make me happy. I don’t think my way into consumerism. Rather, I’m covertly conscripted into a way of life because I have been formed by cultural practices that are nothing less than secular liturgies.2
And how do Christians bring their loves in line with God? Also by creating practices and habits, but ones that draw us toward God. The practices of going to church, reading Scripture, and singing and praying together are not simply dry and useless rituals that we repeat every Sunday because we must. They shape us to love God, just as the shopping mall shapes us to love stuff.
We must know and believe good things, yes. But that isn’t enough. We must also practice habits that transform us into the image of Christ.
Habits matter. Practices matter. They change what we love.
Smith, James K. A. You are what you love: The spiritual power of habit. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2016, 43
pg. 45, 46