No neutral habits?
Did your mom ever tell you to wash behind your ears? Here tone suggesting there was dangerous disease lurking in the shadows of your earlobes ready to climb into your ear canals and eat your brains. If we came in from football practice or climbing trees with grass and twigs in our hair she knew we would take the shortest route out of the bathroom and forget to wash where we couldn’t see. No doubt we still often came out of shower with dirty elbows, but this reveals an interesting reality. We are often unconscious that that which we are closest to. Like our bellybutton, the backside of our love handles, or behind our ears, we all suffer from the possession of blind spots.
What if our culturally affirmed expectations and the habits and behaviors are not universal but learned? But how do we discern the good habits from the bad ones and how can we be formed in ways that orient us to the Kingdom of God?
We have all inherited our way of life from people outside ourselves, most who lived long before us, and it has been given to us as ‘the way things are.’ Whether government, economics, power dynamics, or language, we have been given identities and communities as gifts of our upbringing and we don’t even realize it.
David Brooks says,
“…each of us has unique neural networks, which are formed, reinforced, and constantly updated by the eclectic circumstances of our lives. Once circuits are formed, that increases the chances the same circuits will fire in the future. The neural networks embody our experiences and in turn guide future action. They contain the unique way each of us carries himself in the world, the way we walk, talk, and react. They are the grooves down which our behavior flows. A brain is the record of a life. The networks of neural connections are the physical manifestation of your habits, personality, and predilections. You are the spiritual entity that emerges out of the material networks in your head.” (1)
Brooks goes on to share that habits seem to be driven not only by the firing of neural networks, but by deeper desires found in the heart. These desires transcend our personal ambition or dreams, to wider societal visions and the stories we believe about our shared values.
In the book, Desiring the Kingdom, James K.A. Smith talks about how humans are formed, in terms of the habits and practices and their relative effect on making us into the people we are. He says,
“Both the philosophical tradition and recent cognitive psychology emphasize that our dispositions or automatic habits are acquired and shaped by practices. These are rituals and routines that train our bodies, as it were, to react automatically in certain situations and environments… Some habits are very thin, or mundane, like brushing our teeth, or eating the same cereal for breakfast every day, or watching the eleven o’clock news every night, or exercising daily, and so on. Such things are not usually pursued for their own sake; rather, they are instrumental to some other end. They also aren’t the sort of things that tend to touch on our identity... Other habits are what we could call thick, or meaning-full. These are habits that play a significant role in shaping our identity, who we are. Engaging in these habit-forming practices not only says something about us, but also keeps shaping us into that kind of person. So thick habits often both signal and shape our core values or our most significant desires.” (2)
There are thick and thin practices, that is, habits form us at differing depths and levels of effect, depending on their ability to give us identity and purpose. Smith goes on to say that all well performed and attended “thick” habits are aimed toward a certain telos (or goal). If thick habits are a means intimately connected to an ends, it requires us to then uncover the ends that are hidden or disguised behind our current cultural and personal practices to determine how the means we are participating in could possibly be malforming us (if we think of this as aligning with the liturgies of heaven or hell, truth or lie, we see how If the liturgies of formation are critically important). This is not to try to conform to an order of actions under the strings of a marionette, or the cold rules of a law, but respond to the leading of a dance with a lover, not a determinism or predestination, but a work of art. Looking at our repeated behavior and who are what is driving it is an investigation into how we are being formed, leading to freedom in and through the life of our creator.
If we understand that if our habits and practices are aligned with our ends, we are "perfect" (telos - something used as it was created to be use for; Rom. 12:2), and that most ends have means for us to align with, we see there are a lot of ways to be "perfect", as perfect is determined by the ends one is aiming for. But if we are looking toward the ends God has set for humanity, we see that our ends are to become like Christ, the image bearer, and as we find ourselves submitting all things to Christ's atonement and redemption, we are walking in Christ's image and are building toward the ends that call back to us from the future.
If Jesus is alive, in us and us in him, we must find the practices that join with Jesus in time, throughout days, in habits and liturgies that form the world around the Kingdom of God. A life of communion and prayer is this surrender, it is the acknowledgement that God is Lord over our time and our activities, yet also in and with us in helping reveal how these habits and practices are the way we are to walk that lead to the Kingdom.
What does it look like to form the means of my day around the ends of the Kingdom of God? If the ends are the bringing of all things in heaven and earth under Christ, then how can I form the intricate liturgies of my day around this Kingdom? If the Kingdom of God is love, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, then how does...
love (the sacrifice of oneself to fight for the God given value of someone or something he has created),
peace (internally, to be at peace with God, to be in Christ, with our true self, and Christ in us by our union in continual love, worship and devotion; laterally, forgiveness and peace with other humans; externally, a lack of conflict because we have ascribed ultimate worth and power to Father-Son-Holy Spirit and thus offer our trust and faith to this incarnate Creator – blocking all other pretending and deceiving powers from vying for our worship and creating chaos and conflict inside us),
joy (the emotional-mental-bodily result of the gifts of life, victory, safety, possibilities, wonder, creative power, and belonging because of God's death and resurrection victory over the enemy-accuser-deceiver, sin-lies-separation-exclusion, and over DEATH itself),
...determine the habits and practices of my day so that when my ends become the KINGDOM, I seek FIRST the Kingdom of God, my means will be revealed, and ALL these things will be added unto me?
(1) Brooks, David. The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (p. 49). Random House Publishing Group.
(2) Smith, James K. A.. Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (pp. 81-82). Baker Publishing Group.