You are what you love

Book Review (James K.A. Smith)

This book articulates a spirituality for culture-makers, showing (I hope) why discipleship needs to be centered in and fueled by our immersion in the body of Christ. (p. xi).

There we go : that's what this book is about and what it's trying to show us. So, how does this book differ from Desiring the Kingdom? I would describe YAWYL as a more up-to-date, more accessible version of DTK, which also spends a bit more time working through implications for everyday life and ordinary believers. I think it's a slightly more compelling book for the average reader, and it's the one I recommend people read.

So the front half of this book re-articulates Smith's primary theses: we aren't brains on sticks with legs, we are human beings whose primary locus of identity and being is in our wants, longings, and desires, which means in turn that discipleship has more to do with shaping our longing and loves, than our minds and thoughts (though, and this is an important caveat, it never means we subtract that. I think that's a weakness of Smith's writing at time, that you might think that our minds and ideas are negligible and unimportant. No, but he is de-emphasizing them because of how much our society and our churches have over-emphasized them).

How do we shape our desires? Or rather, how are our loves shaped? By habits, the things we do repeatedly that build up the kinds of persons we are and the forms of choices we make that seem 'natural', or better "second nature" (because they are learned behaviours). And habits, when they are collectivised and carry ascriptions of ultimate meaning, become liturgies.

In short, if you are what you love, and love is a habit, then discipleship is a rehabituation of your loves. p.19

And so our hearts regularly need recalibration, reorientation, to their 'true north', which is God and his Kingdom. This happens in Christian practices, gathered worship and dispersed life.

Smith spends time doing some reading and interpretation of alternate, culture liturgies, as he did in DTK, before turning to historic patterns of worship. These are the regular, ordinary means of grace by which we ought to expect God to nourish and nurture us, instead of our constant (and foolish) expectation that God always intends to show up and do things that are extraordinary and new. In particular, Smith argues that the primary agent in worship is God who is doing things to us, not so much (though still true) that we are doing anything towards him.

Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts. p.77

One of the ways in which worship, of a historic/patterned type restories us, is that it tells again and again the story of the redemptive arc of Scripture, which re-tells the story of Creation-Sin-Fall-Cross-Redemption-Communion-Sending in the liturgical structure itself, which in turn re-stories us as people who live and dwell in such a story. It does this not just at the level of intellectual content delivery, but heart-grabbing imaginative fueling.

For example, the pattern of weekly confession and declaration of forgiveness:

confession—a communal practice whereby we come face-to-face with our sins of both commission and omission, with our disordered desires and our complicity in unjust systems... What is lost when we remove this chapter from so many gatherings that purport to be Christian worship? We lose an important, counterformative aspect of the gospel that pushes back on secular liturgies of self-confidence that, all week long, are implicitly teaching you to “believe in yourself”—false gospels of self-assertion that refuse grace.

The good news of forgiveness is its own countercultural (and hence counterformative) practice that pushes back on the hopelessness and despair of a consumer gospel that can offer only goods and services, not true peace. p.97

Similarly the Lord's Table is part of a broader story:

This culminates in our communing with God and with one another. We are invited to sit down for supper with the Creator of the universe, to dine with the King. But we are all invited to do so, which means we need to be reconciled to one another as well. Our communion with Christ spills over into communion as his body. p.98

In chapter five, Smith moves beyond gathered worship to 'the liturgies of home' - what do you do with the other 167 hours a week. He tackles the way we idolize and privatize the family and marriage, and how we ought to understand these realities as designed to draw us out of ourselves, and point to the Kingdom. Quoting McCarthy, "And “if the church is our first family, then our second homes should be defined by it, and our doors ought to be open to the stranger, the sick, and the poor.” p.118. He draws on the Eastern Orthodoxy liturgy to both lampoon and incisively critique the way our weddings are pure products of out expressivist individualism and consumerism, and then asks how we might build patterns and rhythms of worshipful life into our homes, to transform them into sites of counterformation.

The thrust of the following two chapters continues this trajectory, with chapter 6 considering what this means for education, formation, and children, and chapter seven putting it into practice in the area of vocation and work.

This is, as I've said earlier, a much more accessible book than Desiring the Kingdom, but also a much more practical one in some ways. It gets to more areas of life and presents an imaginative vision of Christian life as a counter-movement built around praxis that grips our hearts. Between this and DtK I've been encouraged not only to continue to learn to love traditional liturgy, but to consider how I can be involved in forming myself and others in ways that do not only feed the intellect, but shape the heart to find its true north, to find its rest in God.