Reflection on You Are What You Love
  • Gottesser
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    I am currently rereading You Are What You Love by James K.A. Smith. As I read through it I thought it would be helpful to write a summary/review of the book. The book in basically a reflection on the development of human behavior and what that looks like if we understand humans to be primarily a "desiring" animal before a "thinking" one. Again, this is simply a way for me to think through the book, which I thought I would share here for others to engage with as well. In this post, I only engage with the preface and chapter 1.

    Preface

    Worship is the spiritual practice that most shapes us and the way we will interact with culture. And we worship what we love. The question, then, is “what do you love?”

    Ch 1

    Jesus asks us, “What do you want?” (1). He asks this question because the heart of discipleship is the heart not the mind. Following Jesus is more about learning to love what God loves and learning how to love like God loves (2). This is not to say that the mind is not important, but most churches disciple as if only the mind matters. We train Christians as if we could “think our way to holiness” (4). That is the problem, we do not realize that our hearts lead us more than out minds.

    Does the emphasis of heart over mind lead to an emotionalism that is different, but equally dangerous (5-6)?

    The rejection that humans are primarily thinking creatures is not a rejection of knowledge; Smith argues that we do need knowledge, but a new kind. The affections, what one desires is the means to knowing. Smith quotes Philippians 1:9-11 to show that Paul understands right knowing to come out of proper love. As Smith writes, “I love in order to know.” (7).

    Augustine explains that humans are made by and for the Creator as revealed in Jesus Christ. And second, that humans are dynamic, meaning that they are always oriented toward something (8). The longing we feel for something is more like hunger than curiosity, it is not an intellectual desire, but a visceral one. This is why the heart is so important, we act on what our heart feels much more often than what our mind thinks. Thus, Augustine concludes, we will only find rest when we order our loves properly, a.k.a. make God our first love.

    Our loves lead us to act because they are the vague and unarticulated, but mentally omnipresent image that guides us in our decision making. We are oriented by what we imagine to be the good life (11). We are motivated to action now by “convincing the intellect, but by allure” (12). Smith summarizes himself, “You are what you love because you live towards what you want” (13). The final example he gives to explain how our desires lead us is gravity. Smith explains that our desires are like gravity, they pull us towards themselves, the stronger the desire the stronger the pull is.

    Our loves guide our decision making, so we should be aware of our loves. But this is the kicker, our loves often operate at a sub-conscience level. Our loves guide our decisions without us ever realizing it. This is where the idea of virtue comes in. The loves we have will manifest as either virtues or vices, depending on whether or not it is a good love. Laws and rules teach the mind what to obey, but it is the virtues that train the heart to embody those laws (18). Smith gives a good analogy: learning virtue is more like learning your piano scales than music theory (18). Virtues are developed through imitation and practice, this means that they must be seen and repeated many times before they become second nature, or a true virtue to a person (19).

    The goal of discipleship is to rehabituate our loves. The core of discipling is to reorient the person’s loves and this is not done through retraining the intellect, but through capturing the heart through a new vision of the good life (22).

    What trains our loves more than anything else is worship because to love something is to worship it. This is why the worst idols are not theological ones, but ones of the heart. Worship then is what reorients our hearts towards God more than right teaching (24).
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