Habits and liturgies

We are all living according to our habits, and those habits shape most of our life. And our unconscious choices form us just as much as our conscious ones. A habit is a behavior that occurs over and over again, and often unconsciously. We can be formed in patterns that we might never consciously choose if we were aware of them. 

 In Justin Whitmel Earley’s The Common Rule, he writes:

 Formation is what you practice and do—things that are caught. The most important things in life, of course, are caught, not taught, and formation is largely about the unseen habits. That’s why to fully understand habits you must think of habits as liturgies. A liturgy is a pattern of words or actions repeated regularly as a way of worship. The goal of liturgy is for the participants to be formed in a certain way…Notice how similar the definition of liturgy is to the definition of habit. They’re both something repeated over and over, which forms you; the only difference is a liturgy admits that it’s an act of worship. Calling habits liturgies may seem odd, but we need language to emphasize the non-neutrality of our day-to-day routines. Our habits often obscure what we’re really worshiping, but that doesn’t mean we’re not worshiping something. The question is, what are we worshiping?

At PasCov, we are taking up liturgies for the next few months to introduce and remind ourselves that we want to be formed spiritually by some new communal habits. We want to see how habits shape our hearts. We want to set in place practices that form us to become the lovers of God and neighbor we were created to be. It is the way of Jesus.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation