How do you make a saint?
The human heart, like clay, is soft, pliable; throughout our lives it is shaped, conformed. The question is: into what? How will your life take on the contours of Christ and not be pressed into the mold of the surrounding culture?
It’s found in the little things, the everyday choices and regular practices that accumulate over time into a life. As Annie Dillard writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” It is these small, repeated acts that orient our heart and shape the kind of people we are becoming.
We understand the Christian faith to be a way of life (a habitus) that is learned through faith practices and spiritual disciplines. The good way of Jesus is found in and formed through embodied and repeated practices that habituate our love for God and others. James K.A. Smith writes: “We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form habits of how we love.”
We give ourselves to these everyday faith practices not as a form of legalistic obedience but to shape our lives and rightly order our loves, directing us to love God and our neighbors.