Habits of the Heart
Our liturgies are not merely the decorations of our lives, but are the manifestations of our most sacred convictions.
If you were to ask my oldest son who was the greatest quarterback ever to play for the Pittsburgh Steelers, he would not tell you Ben Roethlisberger, who led the Steelers to win the Super Bowl in 2005, after leading them to a fifteen and one record his rookie year of 2004. (As I write, he and the Steelers are 3-0, in case you were wondering.) He would not tell you Terry Bradshaw, the current television football analyst who was inducted into the Hall of Fame after leading the Steelers to four Super Bowl victories in six years back in the 1970s. Nope. He would tell you it was Joe Gilliam. Joe Gilliam was a third-string quarterback, who was given the starting job after a player’s strike just before the 1974 season. He started six games, amassing a record of four wins, one loss, and one tie. He was then benched, got caught up in drugs, was eventually cut from the team, and ended up homeless. Why would my son—who was born over twenty years after Joe Gilliam’s last down—pick a player so obscure that most Steeler fans have never heard of him? Because his dad told him Joe Gilliam was the best Steeler quarterback ever. It doesn’t hurt, by the way, that even Terry Bradshaw has publicly conceded that Gilliam was the greatest to ever wear the black and gold. Boy, could he ever throw the ball!
Our habits not only establish what and who we are, they show forth what and who we are. They shape our hearts, even as they show the watching world our hearts. Our liturgies are not merely the decorations of our lives, but are the manifestations of our most sacred convictions.
My goal here, of course, isn’t to ruffle feathers about watching professional football. In fact, I pray those whose feathers are already ruffled will continue on. The truth is, I watch professional football. I watch it with my sons and I watch it with my father. I mention this instead to demonstrate the connection between family traditions and family faith. Traditions are not merely happy things we enjoy from time to time, baubles to beautify our days. They are instead liturgies of our faith. This, in fact, is what liturgy is. It is the process by which habits become virtues, by which repetition becomes conviction. It is the very engine of that wisdom which tells us, “More is caught than taught.”
Because we are children of modernism and most of us are the product of government schools, we have come to believe that we come to believe what we believe because a person in authority stood before us and told us what was so. We believe that information is passed down through lecture, through argument , through logical persuasion. We reached that conviction, however, not because of a well-reasoned argument, or a logical syllogism presented by an expert in front of the class. We reached that conclusion through the very practice of the classroom. We weren’t persuaded of it; we absorbed it. It wasn’t the argument that won us. It was sitting, day after day, listening to arguments.
By the same token I did not present my oldest son with three compelling reasons why he should love the Pittsburgh Steelers. (There are many such reasons: let me know if you’d like to hear some of them.) Instead, I sat him down beside me, as we even now include his two-year old brother, bedecked in his Steeler jersey and waving his Terrible Towel, while I watched and cheered. This “tradition” ingrained in him the same passion my father ingrained in me when I was just a boy. We’re Sprouls, and truth be told we aren’t fans of professional foot-ball. Instead, we love the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The same principle is at work in all our traditions, or liturgies. When we gather together as a family for family worship I am less concerned with the content of what we cover, and more concerned that we—that is, all of us, including my dear wife and me—learn that we exist to worship the living God. When we give thanks before each meal, we are not giving an exposition on the importance of giving thanks to God for providing for our needs; we are remembering to give thanks from our hearts. When my oldest son and I stand at the supper table until my wife, his mother, takes her seat, we are not writing an essay on the honorableness of women. We are instead both showing that honor and learning that honor. My wife is not merely being told that we honor her, but is seeing it before her eyes. My daughters, in turn, are learning in a way they could never get by simply reading a book on the subject, something about what it looks like when a man honors a woman.
Our habits not only establish what and who we are, they show forth what and who we are. They shape our hearts, even as they show the watching world our hearts. Our liturgies are not merely the decorations of our lives, but are the manifestations of our most sacred convictions. Be deliberate about them. Know that they are shaping your children as they are shaping you. Do not turn them into lectures. Enter into them as spiritual disciplines. Your great-grandchildren will thank God that you did.