You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by Smith James K. A

Author:Smith, James K. A. [Smith, James K. A.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: REL012120, Liturgics, Christianity and culture, REL067000, Worship
ISBN: 9781493403660
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

The Poetics of Confession

I have emphasized that Christian worship rehabituates our loves because it embeds us in—and embeds in us—a different orienting Story, the story of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself. But Christian worship doesn’t just rehearse the outlines of this story in a kind of CliffsNotes, bullet-pointed distillation of some “facts.” It does so in a way that is storied, imaginative, and works on us more like a novel than a newspaper article. Story isn’t just the what of Christian worship; it is also the how.

If the biblical narrative of God’s redemption were just information we needed to know, the Lord could have simply given us a book and a whole lot of homework. But since the ascension of Christ, the people of God have been called to gather as a body around the Word and the Lord’s Table, to pray and sing, to confess and give thanks, to lift up our hearts so they can be taken up and re-formed by the formative grace of God that is carried in the rites of Christian worship. Something is going on in the worship of the gathered/called congregation beyond simply the dissemination of information.

The same thing that is going on in worship today was going on in the ancient worship of the people of God—all the way back to Israel—which has also been characterized by a certain poetics. If God meets us as liturgical animals who are creatures of habit, he also meets us as imaginative animals who are moved and affected by the aesthetic. This key intuition about formation is as old as the Psalms.17 Desire-shaping worship isn’t simply didactic; it is poetic. It paints a picture, spins metaphors, tells a story.

In this way the gospel isn’t just information stored in the intellect; it is a way of seeing the world that is the very wallpaper of our imagination. Stories that sink into our bones are the stories that reach us at the level of the imagination. Our imaginations are captured poetically, not didactically. We’re hooked by stories, not bullet points. The lilt and cadence of poetry have the ability to seep down into the fine-grained regions of our imagination in a way that a dissertation never could. The drama and characters of a novel stick with us long after the argument of a book has been forgotten—and then change how we move in the world. Anyone who has truly absorbed Dante or Dickens or David Foster Wallace inhabits the whole world differently. Stories stick.

Actually, the writer David Foster Wallace describes something like what I’m trying to describe here, but in a very different context. In a stunning essay on the “liquid grace” of tennis icon Roger Federer, trying to describe the regimens of formation that could create the prowess of a Federer, Wallace names what I’m fumbling to describe:

Successfully returning a hard-served tennis ball requires what’s sometimes called “the kinesthetic sense,” meaning the ability to control the body and its artificial extensions through complex and very quick systems of tasks.

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