Liturgical Animals
Homo liturgicus
For a while now I have been circling the idea that it's not just a question of "what do we do" but "what kind of people we become in order to act the way we ought". That is, shifting the question from (A) "What would Jesus do in this (crisis) situation?" as if each moral choice is dropped in on us as completely rational agents with infinite time and decision making powers and abstraction to choose what to do, TO (B) how we do become the kinds of people so that when situations arise we are already the kinds of people who choose to do what we ought. This is the movement from ethics as fundamentally about individual choices, to virtue-ethics.
And yet it's one thing to figure this out, it's another to figure out the how. How do we acquire these virtues, or better yet, how do we get ourselves formed into these kinds of people?
In this post I draw together a few parts of my reading lately that initially weren't connected, at least I didn't set out to have this set of readings as a pre-meditated synergy, but let's just say that I think God put them all together in a mixing bowl at the right time to help me see them together.
Habits as virtue formation, not as technique
The first thing to say is that when you wake up and realise that habits are powerful, that's a good thing. But when you think that this is something to leverage in the quest to self-manipulate yourself into being a better You, this is probably technique. That is, habit formation is a powerful feature of human existence, we are creatures of habit in more than a surface-level sense, and so you can realise this and then decide that more than anything this equips us with a psychological understanding of how we operate, the outcome of which is that we should try to train ourselves to be better, more efficient, more fulfilled, human beings. I think that's a misapplication of an anthropological truth. We aren't just trying to trick ourselves into being "better".
Habituation forms us not so much into "a better person with good habits for fulfilled living", but into kinds of persons. And that requires a picture of the kinds of persons we might want to be.
Pennington on the Sermon on the Mount
Among the many good things Pennington has to say about the Sermon on the Mount, some of his main theses pick up this theme : the Sermon is a picture of what human flourishing looks like, and the kinds of people we ought to be, if we want to (i) follow Jesus' teachings, which is also (ii) flourish as humans that are (a) created in God's image, (b) exist in a fallen world, (c) live in light of God's coming kingdom. That picture of human flourishing is primarily virtue oriented, not action oriented. That is, it's once more about shaping the kinds of people we are. In doing so, Jesus pushes us from an external set of practices (do X, don't do Y) to an internal question of heart-orientation. That's why the language of 'from the heart', 'in the heart', and so on. It's why for each of his exegeses of Torah, Jesus takes the issue to the heart-motive, never resting content in the work of the hands.
James Smith on liturgical animals
I've been reading just more recently James Smith's Desiring the Kingdom, in which he makes the case that rather than thinking of humans as primarily 'thinking' creatures or 'believing' ones, we are desiring creatures - our fundamental nature is that we intend towards things, we love things, we desire things, and so we all are oriented towards our ultimate Love. This doesn't jettison our minds and beliefs, but it suggests that all humans love, and what we love constitutes our identity. We love, in particular, that which we ascribe ultimate value to, which is worship. That love/worship is powered, imaginatively, by our vision of the good life, the ideal of human flourishing we inhabit. The way we get, keep, and cultivate such loves is practices, or when we talk about sustained and communal practices : liturgies. Not that we should think fo this in a very narrow, technical sense (e.g. a high liturgy church celebrating the Eucharist), or rather that is not the only liturgy we should think about. All practices, especially sustained community ones, shape us as beings. And so we need to pay conscious attention to our unconscious activities, because so much of how we are shaped as affective beings is about our practices and the embedded ascriptions of value in those practices.
This partly answers what I think of as the "how do you out-catechize the mall?" problem. I don't know where I heard it, but someone talks about how the church is being out-catechized by the 'culture' - people, especially youth, are shaped more and more profoundly by their screens, their playlists, and their world, and how on earth do you counter that. I think Smith has a good insight - it's not simply about content-delivery and knowledge-in-the-head. It's understanding that consumerism and materialism have a whole set of liturgies - embodied (collective) practices of ultimate value - which shape and reinforce us as affective beings, and what we need in response to this is not (just) another teaching series, but to individually and collectively cultivate practices that reorient our loves.
Richard Beck
Richard Beck has a wonderful 8-part series on ‘Practicing Jesus’ (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) that kind of dovetails into all the above, where he talks about the problem of habit/virtue formation, and how so much of spiritual/moral formation fails. What he lands on is "implementation intentions", which he draws from Thérèse of Lisieux and gives some psychological legs to. It is kind of simple really - "When X, Do Y", but applied to moral life. You are committing yourself to doing Y when you experience trigger X. I'll give you a personal example - right now I am working on training myself to notice when my mind starts thinking, "You did A, B, C" with a string of blame and concomitant anger. That's my trigger X, and my intention Y is to stop myself in my mental tracks and just say, "No. I forgive you A, B, C." I am attempting to replace a thought-track of resentment with a practice of habitual internal forgiveness.
I think that's good on an individual level, but thinking back through all the above, I also think there's more thinking to be done at the collective level. That is:
what are the kinds of practices, individual and communal, that will shape and form me and others into people who seek first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness, who love God and (an ever increasing circle of) neighbour, with the kind of love that is modelled on the gracious love of God, embedded and embodied in everyday life?