You are what you love because you live toward what you want.

Just finishes James KA Smith's wonderful book, You Are What you Love", it's a pop version of his more serious work. Below are some excerpts that sum it up :

"What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers?” Christian discipleship frequently starts off on the wrong foot here, as we preach and educate and train and do youth work and even parent according to the wrong model: we assume that people change through learning different things, whereas actually they grow through loving different things. And those loves are not formed mainly through new information, but through new habits.

If you are what you love and if love is a virtue, then love is a habit.

Christian worship, we should recognise, is essentially a counterformation to those rival liturgies we are often immersed in, cultural practices that covertly capture our loves and longings, miscalibrating them, orienting us to rival versions of the good life.

You might not love what you think.

As lovers—as desiring creatures and liturgical animals—our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral.

Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow. Our wants reverberate from our heart, the epicenter of the human person.....discipleship is more a matter of hungering and thirsting than of knowing and believing.

Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves. He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings. His “teaching” doesn’t just touch the calm, cool, collected space of reflection and contemplation; he is a teacher who invades the heated, passionate regions of the heart.  And yet we often approach discipleship as primarily a didactic endeavor—as if becoming a disciple of Jesus is largely an intellectual project, a matter of acquiring knowledge.

Such an intellectualist model of the human person—one that reduces us to mere intellect—assumes that learning (and hence discipleship) is primarily a matter of depositing ideas and beliefs into mind-containers.”

The longing that Augustine describes is less like curiosity and more like hunger—less like an intellectual puzzle to be solved and more like a craving for sustenance ...It’s not just that I “know” some end or “believe” in some telos. More than that, I long for some end. I want something

It is less an ideal that we have ideas about and more a vision of “the good life” that we desire. It is a picture of flourishing that we imagine in a visceral, often-unarticulated way—a vague yet attractive sense of where we think true happiness is found.

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 our imagination.

You are what you love because you live toward what you want.

....if the heart is like a compass, an erotic homing device, then we need to (regularly) calibrate our hearts, tuning them to be directed to the Creator, our magnetic north. ”

We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love. These sorts of practices are “pedagogies” of desire, not because they are like lectures that inform us, but because they are rituals that form and direct our affections.

Our culture often sells us faulty, fantastical maps of “the good life” that paint alluring pictures that draw us toward them. All too often we stake the expedition of our lives on them, setting sail toward them with every sheet hoisted. And we do so without thinking about it because these maps work on our imagination, not our intellect.

Our desires are caught more than they are taught. All kinds of cultural rhythms and routines are, in fact, rituals that function as pedagogies of desire precisely because they tacitly and covertly train us to love a certain version of the kingdom, teach us to long for some rendition of the good life. These aren’t just things we do; they do something to us.

If you are what you love, and your ultimate loves are formed and aimed by your immersion in practices and cultural rituals, then such practices fundamentally shape who you are. At stake here is your very identity, your fundamental allegiances, your core convictions and passions that center both your self-understanding and your way of life. In other words, this contest of cultural practices is a competition for your heart.

Our idolatries, then, are more liturgical than theological. Our most alluring idols are less intellectual inventions and more affective projections—they are the fruit of disordered wants, not just misunderstanding or ignorance. Instead of being on guard for false teachings and analyzing culture in order to sift out the distorting messages, we need to recognize that there are rival liturgies everywhere. These pedagogies of desire are, in a sense, cultural liturgies, rival modes of worship.

To be human is to be a liturgical animal, a creature whose loves are shaped by our worship. And worship isn’t optional.

...we unconsciously learn to love rival kingdoms because we don’t realize we’re participating in rival liturgies.

We need to recognize that our imaginations and longings are not impervious to our environments and only informed by our (supposedly “critical”) thinking. To the contrary, our loves and imaginations are conscripted by all sorts of liturgies that are loaded with a vision of the good life. To be immersed in those “secular” liturgies is to be habituated to long for what they promise.

....we could be so fixated on intellectual temptations that we don’t realize our hearts are being liturgically co-opted by rival empires all the while.

How do we learn to be consumerists? Not because someone comes along and offers an argument for why stuff will make me happy. I don’t think my way into consumerism. Rather, I’m covertly conscripted into a way of life because I have been formed by cultural practices that are nothing less than secular liturgies. My loves have been automated by rituals I didn’t even realize were liturgies. These tangible, visceral, repeated practices carry a story about human flourishing that we learn in unconscious ways. These practices are loaded with their own teleological orientation toward a particular vision of the good life, a rival version of the kingdom, and by our immersion in them we are—albeit unwittingly—being taught what and how to love.

The way to the heart is through the body, you could say.

Our loves and longings are steered wrong, not because we’ve been hoodwinked by bad ideas, but because we’ve been immersed in de-formative liturgies and not realized it. As a result, we absorb a very different Story about the telos of being human and the norms for flourishing. We start to live toward a rival understanding of the good life.

The Spirit of God meets us in that space—in that gap—not with lightning bolts of magic but with the concrete practices of the body of Christ that conscript our bodily habits. If we think of sanctification as learning to “put on” or “clothe” ourselves with Christ (Rom. 13:14; Col. 3:14), this is intimately bound up with becoming incorporated into his body, the corpus Christi.

Discipleship is a kind of immigration, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Col. 1:13). In Christ we are given a heavenly passport; in his body we learn how to live like “locals” of his kingdom. Such an immigration to a new kingdom isn’t just a matter of being teleported to a different realm; we need to be acclimated to a new way of life, learn a new language, acquire new habits—and unlearn the habits of that rival dominion. Christian worship is our enculturation as citizens of heaven, subjects of kingdom come (Phil. 3:20).”

....we are called to worship because in this encounter God (re)makes and molds us top-down. 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.

Oscar Wilde’s provocative dialogue “The Critic as Artist” articulates a relevant insight for us here: learning to love takes practice, and practice takes repetition. In some ways, we belong in order to believe. “Do you wish to love?” Gilbert asks in the dialogue. “Use Love’s Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies they spring.”The liturgy of Christian worship is the litany of love we pray over and over again, given to us by the Spirit precisely in order to cultivate the love he sheds abroad in our hearts.

You won’t be liberated from deformation by new information. God doesn’t deliver us from the deformative habit-forming power of tactile rival liturgies by merely giving us a book. Instead, he invites us into a different embodied liturgy that not only is suffused by the biblical story but also, via those practices, inscribes the story into our hearts as our erotic calibration, bending the needle of our loves toward Christ, our magnetic north. The Scriptures seep into us in a unique way in the intentional, communal rituals of worship. If we want to be a people oriented by a biblical worldview and guided by biblical wisdom, one of the best spiritual investments we can make is to mine the riches of historic Christian worship, which is rooted in the conviction that the Word is caught more than it is taught. The drama of redemption told in the Scriptures is enacted in worship in a way that makes it “sticky.”

…there is a unique, imagination-forming power in the communal, repeated, and poetic cadences of historic Christian worship.

Christian worship doesn’t just dispense information; rather, it is a Christ-centered imagination station where we regularly undergo a ritual cleansing of the symbolic universes we absorb elsewhere. Christian worship doesn’t just teach us how to think; it teaches us how to love, and it does so by inviting us into the biblical story and implanting that story in our bones.

...in the rhythms and cadences of full-orbed Christian worship, we learn something about the gospel that we couldn’t learn in any other way—and might not even be able to put into words. Carried in the practices of Christian worship is an understanding of God that we “know” on a register deeper than the intellect, an understanding of the gospel on the level of the imagination that changes how we comport ourselves in the world, even if we can never quite articulate it in beliefs or doctrines or a Christian worldview.

Worship Character-izes Us

If we act toward what we long for, and if we long for what has captured our imagination, then re-formative Christian worship needs to capture our imagination. That means Christian worship needs to meet us as aesthetic creatures who are moved more than we are convinced. Our imaginations are aesthetic organs. Our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images. We tap our existential feet to the rhythm of imaginative drums.

The way worship does this is by inviting us, week after week, into a set of practices that don’t just communicate information to our minds but conscript our loves and longings through disciplines that speak to our imagination, the deep aesthetic register on which we tacitly understand the world without ever putting it into words—at the level of our social imaginary. To be human is to inhabit some narrative enchantment of the world. Christian worship fuels our imaginations with a biblical picture of a world that, in the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, is “charged with the grandeur of God.”

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. 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. ”

You have a Christlike “feel” for the world, and you act accordingly “without thinking about it.”

“This kind of “sense” is deeper than knowledge; it’s a know-how you absorb poetically, on the register of the imagination.

Smith talks about growing up in Embro, knowing it by *heart, but not being able to give directions when asked,

"I’m not going to be able to help you. Why? Because the way I know Embro is not the kind of knowledge that you find on a map. I learned this town on the ground, from the bottom up. I learned Embro as someone who lived in it, not by looking at it or reflecting on it. Learning street names is an abstract sort of knowledge—a maplike knowledge that sees a town from a vantage point ten thousand feet in the air. Map knowledge is the knowledge of a spectator, not an inhabitant; it is how an outsider sees the village, not a native. I know this town differently because I learned it differently.

I have is what David Foster Wallace called “kinesthetic”: it’s know-how that I carry in my bones. It’s a knowledge that I caught, that I learned by doing. I didn’t even realize I was learning.

....our (culture-)making, our work, is generated as much by what we want as by what we believe. We are made to be makers, but as makers we remain lovers. So if you are what you love, then you make what you love. Your cultural labor—whether in finance or fine arts, as a fireman or a first-grade teacher—is animated less by “principles” that you carry in your head and more by habits of desire that operate under the hood of consciousness.”

Check it out.