As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
Ron Hamilton never set out to be Patch the Pirate. A serious composer of formal church music, Hamilton never dreamed he’d become a children’s musician wearing the uniform of a ship’s captain and talking about scurvy and doubloons. But he lost his eye to cancer in 1978 and children began to see him as a pirate, so he became one and sold a boatload of records.
“The text has its origins in the ‘O Antiphons’—a series of refrains sung on each day from December 17-23 during the evening Vespers service. Each one focuses on a different name of Christ in anticipation of the Incarnation.” Ref21
Three themes dominate James Smith’s You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. (1) Our loves are like unconscious dispositions we have towards the things and events around us and they reveal our identity. (2) The habituation of godly virtues forms our inner self-our soul. So while gaining knowledge of God and His Word is vital to discipleship, the gaining of virtues—the forming of the soul—is the core of discipleship. (3) The primary way of gaining virtues (of forming the soul) is liturgy in the church.
Chapter 1 explores love and worship. Which is more indicative of our identity? What we love, or what we think? Smith argues that what we love defines our identity. We as humans love something. “You can’t not love.”1 Our loves dictate our choices. Smith compares our loves to our compass, a default orientation of the soul.
Virtues are the habituated, internalized inclinations of the soul “to be compassionate, forgiving, and so forth.”2 “As Aristotle put it, when you’ve acquired a moral habit, it becomes second nature.”3 “Those habits that become ‘second’ nature operate in the same way: they become so woven into who you are that they are as natural for you as breathing and blinking. You don’t have to think about or choose to do these things: they come naturally.”4 “In fact, if I have to deliberate about being compassionate, it’s a sure sign I lack the virtue!”5
Discussion