New Year and Habits of the Heart

In Steven Pressfield’s highly imagined book on how three hundred Spartan warriors and their battle slaves held off over a Persian army of over a hundred thousand at the Pass of Thermopylae, the question he seeks to answer is, “How could such a small group of men persist against such overwhelming odds for so long and then all die to a man rather than surrender or retreat?” It is a remarkable story that has passed into myth and legend.It is really one of those hinge points in history and the fact we have a Western Civilization is in large part because these three hundred, led by their king Leonidas of Sparta, held the only pass in Northern Greece against the invading Persian army led by Xerxes I attempting to march through to conquer all of Greece. Those 300 warriors holding off the vast hordes of Persian invaders is a story many have written about and most have tried to understand. Their heroic actions gave the rest of Greece time to mobilize and finally defeat the Persian Army. So how did they do it?Pressfield tells the story of the training of a Spartan warrior through the eyes of a battle slave who, though he can never be a Spartan, nevertheless goes though the training that all Spartans went through. The answer to the genius of the Spartan warriors is not novel at all, it is habit. After the training of these young Spartans begins, one of their instructors tells his young apprentices this: “Habit will be your champion. When you train the mind to think one way and one way only, when you refuse to allow it to think in another, that will produce great strength in battle.” (Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire) That is not just a recipe for training warriors - that is a good formula for forming human beings!As we embark on a new year it is natural to think about transformation. Who of us is really happy with where we are in life? Who of us when thinking of what we can be and what we really are is not embarrassed, or worse, depressed. Alas, it is part of our fallen condition to not be what we ought to be - the aspirational self and the real self remain two different people. Because this is a universally human problem every year we are flooded with new best sellers on “self-improvement.” They are best selling because, though we are not the people we should be, we do long for change and to be made new.The Church has always recognized that this is an ongoing problem. It has never panicked about it or thought it was anything new. The Church following the Bible called this a question of “sanctification.” The root of the word is cleansing. In other words, how are we cleaned up as human beings to become what we are intended to be. The Bible says this is a progressive thing and it also says it is hard. The Bible assumes weare selfish and prone to wander. The Bible assumes also that everything is conspiring against us to keep us from becoming what we can be in Jesus. The “world, the flesh, and the devil” all play havoc with our best intentions and will hijack our desires to do the good in favor of immediate gratification all the time. Who is sufficient for these things? Or as St. Paul, who knew a little something about transformation would say, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?”But there is deliverance, and much like in the training of the Spartans, it comes not through novelty, innovation, or the latest fade. No, the ways of transformation are as old as humanity, and though not glamorous, are proven. The Bible talks about things God gives us that form us. And if we are to see the gap between the real self and the self we can be in Jesus it is a matter of developing certain “habits of the heart.” Habits that, if taken in the heart, inform the mind and help the will find reasonable.So as we enter this New Year it is a good time to take inventory and to ponder what might be. It is a time to heed the wisdom of the ages and stop flirting with pop wisdom on how we can get better. Change is a long, hard, dirty road and takes place in the mud. Much as the formation of any great athlete or musician happens in isolation from the crowd, smells like a gymnasium, and is under the tutelage of a caring coach; Christian formation of the character is much the same. Let me explain how this looks at St. Patrick.We have a place on our website and app that is called the St. Patrick Soul Room. We call it that because this is place we go daily to be alone with God. We bring our heart and soul before God in an attempt to know God’s friendship and his presence and to hear him speak to us from his word. While we do this in private and alone, we are anything but alone in this praying exercise—you are doing this in community with a large percent of the St. Patrick family, so that even our private exercises are taking place in the community of our family.I challenge you to join us in the Soul Room. This is a dream come true for some of your spiritual directors at St. Patrick. We have a way that is easily assessable to everyone that forms us both individually and as a community as we pray and mediate on what God is saying to us from the same Psalms and Scriptures every day! It is our adaptation of the best practices from the wisdom of the ages put in the language and practice of a community of people living in an age of technology.To really love God, love people, and love life is not instinctive; it is on the other end of habits of grace that train our affections and desires. So join us, won’t you? I promise you that on the other side of the death of finding time and space to be quiet and get alone with God there will be resurrection and newness of life. But you have to start…