Habit Forming

The Lord is my light and my salvation.
        Should I fear anyone?
    The Lord is a fortress protecting my life.
        Should I be frightened of anything?
 When evildoers come at me trying to eat me up—
    it’s they, my foes and my enemies,
    who stumble and fall!
 If an army camps against me,
        my heart won’t be afraid.
    If war comes up against me,
        I will continue to trust in this:

    I have asked one thing from the Lord—
    it’s all I seek:
        to live in the Lord’s house all the days of my life,
        seeing the Lord’s beauty
        and constantly adoring his temple.
Because he will shelter me in his own dwelling
    during troubling times;
    he will hide me in a secret place in his own tent;
        he will set me up high, safe on a rock. (Psalm 27:1-4 6:4-9, CEB translation)

“We were thinking of showing him eating hot chocolate.” Then she exclaimed with exasperation, “No, drinking hot chocolate! That’s another thing I get from my parents! They mix up eating and drinking sometimes. Like ‘Drink your rice’ or ‘Eat your lemonade!’”

She is the child of immigrant parents. We had spent our lunch together talking about the challenges of navigating the world in two cultures. That includes two languages. I also shared, though, that our parents model things for us, and they are so pervasive and imperceptible that we don’t even realize we have passed down habits until they are so ingrained it is almost impossible to shake them off.

In my case, I can think of two such habits. It is disturbing to me to eat the last bite of any sandwich. Why? Well, after discussing it with my mother one day, we came to the conclusion that I can’t eat the last bite of my sandwich because she never eats the last bite of her sandwich. She never eats the last bite of her sandwich because when she was 10 she had a dog named Tippy, and she would always save the last bite of her sandwich for Tippy. She got in the habit and never broke it, and inadvertently passed it down to her daughter. I might have passed it down to my son, but he doesn’t eat sandwiches.

I also shake containers of milk before I pour myself a glass. Why? Because my dad always shook containers of milk before he poured them. Why did he shake containers of milk? Because he grew up on a farm with cows. Their milk came fresh. That also meant as it sat in the fridge, the cream rose to the top. To redistribute the cream, you shook the container. Hey, you know what doesn’t happen to store bought milk? It doesn’t separate. Nonetheless, generations of my family will shake the containers as if it does. Or actually, we will shake the containers not knowing why we shake the containers in the first place.  That’s just what you do with milk, right?

Both of those habits were passed down inadvertently. Unconsciously. No one set out to teach me to do those things, but both of those actions were regularly modeled for me by the people who were my examples, and so the habits became ingrained.

You know what was not modeled for me? Going to church.

Growing up in the 1980’s and 90’s in the Bible belt, I was not a total anomaly as an unchurched youth, but I was certainly rarer than I would be today. My parents, though, had unusual upbringings for the 1950’s. My mother came from divorced parents. My father’s father was killed by a drunk driver when he was 10, and his mother struggled to hold the family together after that. Neither of them found much grace or welcome in the bloated church of the 50’s and 60’s. In fact, they found judgment and hypocrisy instead. So, they broke the habit of going to church, and passed that broken habit down to me.

It is nothing short of stunning that I started going to church, and nothing short of a miracle that I am a pastor. But let me also admit something else. Going to church still feels weird. In fact, if there was a way for me to live out my call and not go to church, I would probably do it. It is not that I object to church, and have in fact had powerfully transformative experiences there, once I started going. It is just that my early habits, the life that was modeled for me at the time when my DNA was cooperating with my environment to significantly shape me, did not include organized religion.

Yes, that means it is more natural for me to shake milk and not eat the last bit of my sandwich than to worship on Sunday morning. 22 years as a baptized Christian, 5 years of seminary, 5 years of work on a PhD in New Testament, and nearly 7 years serving as a pastor has not undone that early imprinting that I am a person who does not go to church.

God knows how important those formative days, months, and years are.  This is why God instructs the Israelites to imprint God’s word and God’s way of living on their lives. Talk about it all the time. Specifically recite these words to your children, but you know if you go around muttering them all the time and even put them on your doorpost, then whether you deliberately instruct them to your children or not, they will learn them. They will be shaped by them. They will become the people of the word. And as people of the word, they will also know that they are called to worship, and worship will also be imprinted on their existence. They may walk away from it. But they will, on some level, feel weird about walking away from it. Such instructions appear to us across the Bible in various ways, but certainly in what is know as the shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9), a passage as central to the Jewish faith as John 3:16 is to Christians.   

Rather than quoting the shema in the opening passage of this blog, however, I turned to the Psalms. I did so for two reasons. First, the Psalms constitute the hymn book of the Bible. If there are any words that imprint in us now, they are the words of songs that we know. Some of these for most of us include hymns. Even as a non-churchgoer, I knew “Amazing Grace” and “I’ll Fly Away,” at least enough to keep up for one verse. And I bet a majority of us, even those who have never stepped in a Christian church, know some Christmas hymns, especially “Silent Night.”

But I also chose this Psalm in particular because it speaks of the habit of being in the Lord’s house. This person wants to be there every day. A place you want to be every day is going to be a place that is central to who you are. Not just your movements but also your identity would be wrapped up in such a place. And the words of the Psalm reveal why this place is so important: because the God we know in that place provides us protection. Now, this is not the blog post to dig deeply into what that protection means. Let me just say that for me, it has not meant I have a life free from troubles. No, I know that faith not only does not protect me from evil, it sometimes deeply complicates how I respond in such times. But I can also affirm that, even in the midst of the darkest days, knowing God is there with me (even if God seems stunningly hard to find) gives me the peace and the strength to confront difficulty. I am grateful that over these past 25 years I have been able to cultivate that habit of response. That habit was passed down to me from parents who did know how to navigate tragedy, and perhaps knew that because a faithful walk was modeled to them in the culture around them.

But now, now what habits of resilience do people have? What language do they know for navigating life? The habit of church does not guarantee such a language, but it increases the odds. And it gives our children a pattern to return to when things get off track. But if they never had that pattern, if it was never imprinted on them when they were forming their own identities, they will have to fight to develop it later.

We pass things down to our children. Or we do not pass them down. We form habits in our children. Or we break habits. We choose for them what happens with their faith, or what they have to overcome to have faith. We invite our children to stand on the pew next to us and sing hymns and recite creeds, or we send them out of the worship service to play games. We encourage them to put a portion of their allowance in the plate, or we put our hand up and shake our head no to the ushers.

And then we bemoan that our children become adults who do not have a foundation of faith to stand on. But we never took the time to pass faith down. We never gave them a chance to become fluent. We excused them from the opportunity, and weep when they don’t know what they are missing. And we ache as we watch them struggle to find their way in a very confusing landscape of post-Christendom culture.

The truth is, a tall glass of pasteurized milk and a leftover bite of a sandwich will not sustain them through this life. But they have what we give them. Anything else is hard fought, and maybe never won.   

 Photo by MissMushroom on Unsplash