The first move in James K. A. Smith’s argument in You Are What You Love is to help us understand that longing and desire play a key role in understanding why we do what we do.  “Your love or desire– aimed at a vision of the good life that shapes how you see the world while also moving and motivating you– is operative on a largely nonconscious level.  Your love is a kind of automaticity,” he asserts.  You are more than just a thinking self.  You are (primarily) and feeling and wanting self.

And so his second move it to help us get a better look “under the hood” and see if corrections can be made, if repentance is possible.  He does this is a way that might “recast” sin in a light that is difficult to swallow, but his argument is worth following:

. . . not all sins are decisions. Because we tend to be intellectualists who assume that we are thinking things, we construe temptation and sin accordingly: we think temptation is an intellectual reality, where some idea is presented to us that we then think about and make a conscious decision to pursue (or not). But once 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 deformation and wrongly ordered habits. In other words, our sins aren’t just discrete, wrong actions and bad reflections; they reflect vices. Overcoming them requires more than just knowledge: it requires rehabituation, a re-formation of our loves.

The move he makes, which is odd to those of us with an evangelical, not-so-classical background, is to introduce the ideas of habits and virtues and vices.  And so beyond . . . or perhaps beneath . . . sins that are decisions, there are different forces at work, things that require rehabituation and re-formation.

+ + + + +

I remember something interesting happened to me some time after I started teaching.  After a few weeks, months, of getting to know my students and the things that were significant to them (hobbies, tv shows, music), I started seeing the world through different eyes.  I noticed things that were important to them, and the recognition wasn’t forced at all.  It was the result of day-after-day connection, of learning to know people, to love them, and to somehow become connected to what they loved, too.  That’s something life what I think Smith is talking about.  And it’s something worth reflecting well on.

(image from eremedia.com)