One of the ways that You Are What You Love moves beyond James K. A. Smith’s other books on “cultural liturgies” is how it approaches the implications for daily life.  Smith spends one solid chapter on marriage and “household life.”  It’s great stuff, particularly in how it references the Orthodox wedding ceremony as a better picture to guide marriages.

Here’s a great example of Smith’s take on the household in light of liturgies and love:

Every household has a “hum,” and that hum has a tune that is attuned to some end, some telos. We need to tune our homes, and thus our hearts, to sing his grace. That tuning requires intentionality with regard to the hum, the constant background noise generated by our routines and rhythms. That background noise is a kind of imaginative wallpaper that influences how we imagine the world, and it can either be a melody that reinforces God’s desires for his creation or it can (often unintentionally) be a background tune that is dissonant with the Lord’s song. You could have Bible “inputs” every day and yet still have a household whose frantic rhythms are humming along with the consumerist myth of production and consumption. You might have Bible verses on the wall in every room of the house and yet the unspoken rituals reinforce self-centeredness rather than sacrifice.

It is possible, and highly likely, that we “do the right things” while inadvertently promoting a wrong perspective.  “Checking the background noise” and considering the “imaginative wallpaper” must be heavy tasks, but I also have to think they are necessary and good.

(image from virtuallyatyourservice.co.uk)