5. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening,” 135.
6. King, “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.”
7. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:36–40).
8. Day repeated this line on several occasions in her “On Pilgrimage” column in the Catholic Worker magazine.
5
How Do We Become Virtuous?
THE POWER OF HABIT
We are saved by grace of course, and by it alone, and not because we deserve it. That is the basis of God’s acceptance of us. But grace does not mean that sufficient strength and insight will be automatically ‘infused’ into our being in the moment of need. . . . A baseball player who expects to excel in the game without adequate exercise of his body is no more ridiculous than the Christian when put to the test without the appropriate exercise in godly living.
—Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines
Not long ago I saw an advertisement on social media. A new Bible-study plan hit the market. Featuring a young man who had once grown stale in his Bible reading, this ad claimed the Bible study transformed his life as soon as he started it. It completely changed his spiritual life.
Maybe it did. But I tend to be skeptical of quick-fix spirituality. If a new consumer good creates immediate transformation, I question the depth of that transformation. A deep spirituality is less like a love-at-first-sight infatuation and more like the hard-won love of an enduring marriage. Growing with God is a marriage, not a fling. As Jennifer Herdt notes in her book on virtue, “It is not through an instantaneous evangelical rebirth, a lightning bolt from heaven, that Christians are made [virtuous], but through hearing the scriptures that proclaim the story of God with us and participating in the practices of the church constituted by its willingness to be defined by that story.”1 As Christians, we grow through participation in the regular means of grace. Sometimes we sense our growth, and it’s exciting, like lightning. Other times, the same growth can seem like a carrot growing—underground, unseen, unnoticed, undetected.
In my youth I was sold the “mountaintop experience” form of spirituality. The next big thing defined the life of faith. A retreat would help me grow. A conference would be the catalyst of maturity. Doing something new and exciting was the way to sustain faith. I’m all for those things, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized the value of daily, habitual, unsexy rituals. Spiritual writer Tish Harrison Warren says, “The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.”2 Indeed, as Ronald Rolheiser writes, “Love and prayer can only be sustained through ritual, routine, and rhythm.”3 I’ve learned that showing up is half the battle.
The energy and enthusiasm of the moment you first believed are impossible to sustain. Seeking such a spirituality would be like, after sixty years of marriage, expecting to have the same butterflies one had in a budding romance. But that’s not how love works. As I write these words, I’ve been married only eight years, and I don’t have those butterflies anymore. But I love my wife a lot more now than I did eight years ago.
When things get stale, dry, and boring, what will sustain a life of faith (or love)? No one can be interesting, lively, or emotionally compelling all the time. Life is filled with the mundane and normal. Rolheiser writes, “What sustains a relationship long-term is ritual, routine, a regular rhythm that incarnates the commitment.”4 Habits incarnate commitment.
THE PROBLEM OF GOODNESS AFTER THE REFORMATION
I know how unexciting and deadening and inauthentic the word “ritual” sounds. Early in ministry I was meeting with a younger man who had fallen on some hard times. His faith, which had once been strong, now seemed weak. Struggles with sin that he thought were long gone had come back with a force he’d never experienced. I wanted to schedule a regular meeting with him. But to him the idea of scheduling a meeting sounded so . . . ritualistic. If I really loved and valued him, he thought, I would just text him because I wanted to hang out. Putting a meeting on the calendar robbed our relationship of spontaneity and therefore of the affection that drives relationship.
I understand that sentiment to some extent. When I was younger I had enough margin that I could text someone on a free Tuesday afternoon to see what they were up to. Yet as I’ve gotten older and time has become more squeezed, I have realized the importance of ritual and habits. Scheduling a meeting does not stifle love but rather stimulates it so that it flourishes. If I don’t schedule it, I’ll be too distracted or busy to think about it. I may not want to do it in the moment, and I may not think to do it if it’s not scheduled. But if I truly value something in my life, then the way that incarnates itself is in a habit or practice.
The issue of authenticity and virtue presents itself in the Reformation as well. Doesn’t this talk of virtue seem like works righteousness? Isn’t this ritualistic religion what Martin Luther railed against after he had wrestled with guilt and shame and the question of how he could be accepted by God? Don’t these rituals negate grace?
There is indeed a danger in pursuing goodness when we think we can make ourselves good or that goodness consists of our own effort. The temptation to work for affection, to do something special so that God will love us, to prove ourselves worthy of God’s love is ever present. It’s a real thing.
The reason we desire goodness matters. The premises and meaning of actions are important because truth matters (see part 1). Is the habit meant to earn God’s love? If so, that practice is anti-gospel and anti-grace. Is it out of obligation? If so, isn’t it inauthentic? Shouldn’t we act by what we feel? And who can tell me what to do anyway?
Today I find a version (or perversion) of Christianity that stands at the opposite extreme from Luther and the Reformation. As I talk to young people, the most common misperception I encounter is that God doesn’t really care about what we do because he knows what’s in our hearts. They seem to think that Christianity is a belief system rather than a way of life, as if God cares that we believe in the gospel but is indifferent to what we regularly do. He’s not concerned about those outside things or external actions—that’s religion. All he cares about are interior intentions and relationship. Believing is the bare minimum of flourishing, and that’s all God would ask of us. Leave my life alone.
After all (so this line of thought goes), Luther thought that no external practice or imitation of an exemplar could produce the righteousness of God. Such actions are seen as fake, superficial. “Rather,” as Jennifer Herdt describes this thinking, “the starting point must be a moment of utter passivity, in which we relinquish any reliance on human agency. We must not begin ‘acting the part’ of virtue but instead seeming to be what we are in fact—sinful.”5 To pretend to be virtuous would be to put confidence in one’s ability rather than in the righteousness of God. Isn’t practicing virtue inauthentic if we don’t feel it? Going to church when we don’t want to would make us hypocrites, right?
Both ideas—that habits negate grace and that God cares only about interior intentions—are understandable but misguided. Truth and goodness are intimately connected. In part 1 of the book, we looked at how beliefs shape behavior. But in part 2, we are considering the way behavior shapes belief. In liturgical parlance we say, Lex orandi, lex credendi, “The law of prayer is the law of belief.” On this phrase, Tish Harrison Warren contends, “We come to God with our little belief, however fleeting and feeble, and in prayer, we are taught to walk more deeply into truth. When my strength wanted and my words ran dry, I needed to fall into a way of belief that carried me. I needed other people’s prayers.”6 Especially when we don’t feel like or mean it, we need practices to help us. Behavior shapes and displays our belief in a reciprocal fashion. These monotonous routines can shape us into either more integrated and congruous selves or disintegrated and incongruous selves. The question is, Who do you want to be? And then, Who are you planning to be? If you want to grow into a person of virtue, building habits will always have the feel of inauthenticity, because it’s not who you are—yet.
“IN YOUR SERVICE IS PERFECT FREEDOM”
What does it mean to be free? Paul reminds us in Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1). That sounds pretty nice. Especially in America, we love freedom. We are free from things like restraint. No one can tell us what to do or how to be. We’re free. This talk of ritual seems to go right out the door.
This American concept of freedom is known as “negative freedom.” It emphasizes freedom from. In Christianity we can say that we’re free from the curse of the law. We’re free from condemnation. We’re free from Mosaic stipulations. We may be free from those regulations or guilt, but what are free for or free to do? We may be free from restraint, but what is the positive good we are pursuing? This deeper liberty is known as “positive freedom.” G. K. Chesterton writes that “Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.”7 The doctrines I talked about in part 1 and the habits discussed here in part 2 are not restrictive but playful. They allow us to run wild and have fun within the context of what will truly bring us joy. Rituals help us stay in eternal, flourishing, good life. God is inviting us into a fuller life with him by curbing our freedom.
In the same passage where Paul says that Christ set us free for freedom, he says, “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another” (Gal. 5:13). This Christ-bought freedom has a positive good. We’re not free to do whatever we want. That would make us slaves to ourselves and to sin. That’s what Christ set us free from. In Christ we are finally free to love one another. We were unable to love others sacrificially apart from Christ.
This idea of slavery is also evident in Romans 6:15–23. In this life we don’t have a choice of total freedom. The problem, to quote Bob Dylan, is that we “gotta serve somebody.” Like the Israelites in Deuteronomy, we have a choice. We are either slaves of sin, which leads to death, or we are slaves of righteousness, which leads to life (Rom. 6:15–23). We get to choose our master. Which master we choose will dictate our destiny. We either earn death or receive the gift of eternal, lasting, full life.
If we are slaves of God, then every aspect of our life comes before him: our minds, hearts, and bodies. He is a master who leaves no stone unturned. He cares about it all—even our habits, even our mundane moments. Consider that the God of Israel is the Christian God. There aren’t two different gods operating on two different principles. The God who made all those stipulations on how to worship is the same God we meet in the face of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Presumably, then, God still cares about the minute details of our life. He cares about how we spend our time. He cares about what we do with our bodies. Stanley Hauerwas suggests that “any religion that does not tell you what to do with your pots and pans and genitals cannot be interesting.”8 There is no public and private divide to God. Intention and practice are not neatly divided. He cares about our doctrine and the story we inhabit, and he cares about the mundane, like pots and pans. God cares about what we do with our bodies. He cares about our habits. The content of what we worship (truth) is important, but how we worship (goodness) is just as important.
PUTTING OFF SIN: ASCETIC PRACTICES
When people expect their pastor to help them display and then heal their wounds, the Christian faith is reduced to a technique for gaining control over your life so you can be happy. I hope their pastor would ask, “Why would you come to me for that?”
—Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, “The Dangers of Providing Pastoral Care”
There’s something wrong with you. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but it’s true. I live with the same reality: there is something ingrained deep in the fiber of my being that is disordered. There’s a gap between who I am now and who I want to become. If I didn’t admit that fact, I would be a narcissist. Confessing that fact is the first step toward humility.
When Dwight Eisenhower was about ten years old, his parents gave his older brothers permission to go out trick-or-treating one Halloween. Ike, as he was called, was too young to join. Enraged by this injustice, he went into an uncontrollable frenzy. He ended up outside, punching an apple tree until his knuckles were red with blood. His father grabbed him, found a stick, and used it to spank him. Ike promptly went to bed. Later, his mother came up and found Ike crying into his pillow. She gently guided him by quoting a verse from Proverbs: “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city.” As she comforted him and began caring for his bloody knuckles, she warned him about the passions that waged war within him.
When Eisenhower was older, he acknowledged, “I have always looked back on that conversation as one of the most valuable moments of my life. To my youthful mind, it seemed to me that she talked for hours, but I suppose the affair was ended in fifteen or twenty minutes. At least she got me to acknowledge that I was wrong and I felt enough ease in my mind to fall asleep.”9 An earlier generation understood that we humans live in a moral drama, and central to this story is the presence of weakness and sin. In a past age, weakness was something to be reflected on and explored. Today we tend to ignore or justify weakness. We often refuse to admit we’re wrong.
For Eisenhower, humility came with humiliation. As much as I hate exposure, I need to have my sin revealed if I am to know it and to fight against it. There is no part of this process that is pleasant. I wish there were another way, but I know no other way. Perhaps so many of us struggle with the root of sin (pride) because we never try anything worthwhile. We fear failing, so we don’t fail. We play it safe and don’t think about sin. We cover it up so others don’t see it. Rather than try to root out sin, we ignore it. Rather than meditate, we get busy with the day. Rather than pray, we turn to our phones. As a result, we never grow in humility.
Failure is the fertilizer that makes love grow. Grace finally has a crack that it can seep through. As long as we are strong on our own, we are weak. We need to be like Paul, in whom God’s “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). The spiritual journey is painful because the false self—that self that we build up by value systems of the world to protect us from pain or emotional hurt—needs to be constantly humiliated if we are to get to the true self.10
This true self faces the tension of authenticity and hypocrisy. Doing good can create a feeling of wearing a mask, and being bad can feel authentic. But the redeemed self—the self the individual is in the sight of God, the self that God made that person to be—is their deepest, truest self. Discovering this self requires the false self to die. And death is hard.
Ascetic practices help us die. Asceticism is a way of curbing the false self and living into the true self. The goal, to borrow a statement from John the Baptist, is for us to decrease and for Jesus to increase (John 3:30). The monastics urge fellow believers to die to self for the sake of life with Christ. A written tradition started with Evagrius and developed over the years through John Cassian, Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and the poet Dante. It has a rich lineage. Instead of finding their strengths, they sought out their weaknesses, or what they termed vices. There were seven vices: envy, vainglory, sloth, avarice, anger, gluttony, and lust. Pride was the root of all of these. Vices were not one-off acts but, rather, were patterns of behavior that marked the monastics.
Have you ever been telling someone a problem and they attempt to define the problem in their own words? Sometimes they can’t quite relate, or the message you’re trying to communicate and the message they’re receiving are different. But other times, a friend listens and understands and rephrases the issue better than you explained it. So you respond, “Yes! That’s it. That’s what I’m going through.” The great tradition dealing with vice does something like this for us. It names the soul struggle we feel and makes us feel a bit less alone, a bit less strange and alienated from the history of saints before us. And not only does it name the struggle, but it provides help and counsel.
