Space Enough, and Time

One of the odd gifts of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is the way that it enchants the world for the reader . . . only to see that enchantment end as the story draws to a close.  A compounded sense of loss, indeed.  In the vein of Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith argues that modernity has “flattened” and “disenchanted” the world.  His argumentation in You Are What You Love is a kind of response to that . . . a suggestion of how Christians might go about “re-enchanting” the world.

. . . now that the whole world has been disenchanted and we have been encased in a flattened “nature,” I expect it will be forms of reenchanted Christianity that will actually have a future. Protestant excoriation has basically ceded its business to others: if you are looking for a message, an inspirational idea, some top-up fuel for your intellectual receptacle— well, there are entire cultural industries happy to provide that . . .

But what might stop people short— what might truly haunt them— will be encounters with religious communities who have punched skylights in our brass heaven. It will be “ancient” Christian communities— drawing on the wells of historic, “incarnate” Christian worship with its smells and bells and all its Gothic peculiarity, embodying a spirituality that carries whiffs of transcendence— that will be strange and therefore all the more enticing . . . Because when the thin gruel of do-it-yourself spirituality turns out to be isolating, lonely, and unable to endure crises, the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd might find itself surprisingly open to something entirely different. In ways that they never could have anticipated, some will begin to wonder if “renunciation” isn’t the way to wholeness, if freedom might be found in the gift of constraint, and if the strange rituals of Christian worship are the answer to their most human aspirations. What Christian communities need to cultivate in our “secular age” is faithful patience, even receiving a secular age as a gift through which to renew and cultivate an incarnational, embodied, robustly orthodox Christianity that alone will look like a genuine alternative to “the spiritual.”

(image from theonering.net)

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.

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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)

James K. A. Smith’s new book, You Are What You Love, drops today.  It’s been available digitally for a couple of weeks, though.  The book is a great read, accurately simplifying and building off of Smith’s thesis about “cultural liturgies” as found in Desiring the Kingdom.  Smith builds his argument well, starting off with the assumption that we all long for things and that such longings are deeper than any intellectual assent that we might make.  Consider:

To be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as “flourishing.” And we want that. We crave it. We desire it. This is why our most fundamental mode of orientation to the world is love. We are oriented by our longings, directed by our desires. We adopt ways of life that are indexed to such visions of the good life, not usually because we “think through” our options but rather because some picture captures your imagination. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of The Little Prince, succinctly encapsulates the motive power of such allure: “If you want people to build a ship,” he counsels, “don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” We aren’t really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties. Instead some panoramic tableau of what looks like flourishing has an alluring power that attracts us, drawing us toward it, and we thus live and work toward that goal. We get pulled into a way of life that seems to be the way to arrive in that world. Such a telos works on us, not by convincing the intellect, but by allure . . . So again, it’s a question not of whether you long for some version of the kingdom but of which version you long for . . . You are what you love because you live toward what you want.

The idea of the good life weaves in and out of Smith’s argument, too.  It’s a phrase that has been twisted and co-opted in ways that can make it toxic towards some people of faith, like it’s about health and wealth when in reality it’s closer to something like human flourishing.

And so we ask the question: what world are we directing ourselves, feeling ourselves, to?  What kind of kingdom is the object of our affection?  What love is drawing us most?

(image from appszoom.com)