You Are What You Love
How your reading life can help reorder your loves
"Here ceased the powers of my high fantasy.
Already were all my will and my desires
Turned—as a wheel in equal balance—by
The Love that moves the sun and the other stars."
-Dante, Paradiso
Love, according to Dante, is the force that moves all of creation. Of course, he is speaking of God, Love himself, who sets the planets in motion out of love for us, and who turns us back to Himself with that same love. But on a smaller scale, it is also true that who and what we love move us and make us into who we are. In fact, in her recent article (shared below), Tsh Oxenreider reminds us that we human beings are primarily what we love. Your thoughts do have an effect on who you are, but it is the things you love that will change your behavior and spur you on to action.
When we examine our loves with this in mind, we will all find things we love more than we should, and things we do not love as we ought. Part of living life as a Christian and striving for virtue is realigning your loves with God’s word. Tsh writes, “There are lots of ways to correctly realign our loves, and most of them are boring and ordinary. These habits look like taking out the trash, going to bed at a decent hour, holding your tongue when you’d like to lash out at the foolish person in front of you, making dinner for your family when you don’t feel like it, and listening to your child with rapt attention even when they’re taking far too long to tell that story. Virtue is built one day at a time, one action at a time, one choice at a time.”
Building habits takes time and patience and humility. But these habits can be helped along by a good diet of quality things. “Just like a steady diet of cotton candy would cause cavities and stomach aches, a regular consumption of shallow teaching and entertainment leads to laziness, poor thinking, and restless hearts.” Thus, in her article, Tsh goes on to focus on her reading life, and how a diet of quality, solid reading helps realign her loves in her everyday life. In her article, she gives helpful tips on how to fit reading into an already full schedule, and a helpful reading plan for your year if you want to tackle a wide range of good, quality books. If you don’t do much reading, this plan may be longer than you can accomplish in a year, and if you are already a voracious reader you may have no need for additional categories to consider. However, Tsh wisely urges all of us to read a few more old books this year, stretching our minds, attention spans, and loves. Luckily, the reading of old books gets easier the more you do it, and the more you stretch yourself to tackle a hard book, the more your ability as a reader and thinker grows.
C. S. Lewis famously writes in praise of reading old books, because among other reasons, “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.” His recommendation for those new to reading old books is to read at least one old book for every three new books. Perhaps this year you can challenge yourself to do just that. And the most accessible and available old book on your shelf is one that it is all too easy to forget about, namely the Bible. If you don’t know where to start, pull out your Bible and make your way through it. In doing so, you can, like Dante, meet the Love who moves the sun and stars, and have your will and desires turn more and more to Him.
