More on Habits

Whether you eat or drink, or do anything else, do all for the glory of God.  St Paul, 1 Corinthians 10:31

Good moral habits are called virtues.   The word virtue comes from a Latin word meaning excellence or that which is appropriate to a man ("man" meaning human rather than animal or plant, not meaning "man" vs "woman").

You can see that it might be appropriate to an animal simply to spend its life searching for food, eating,  and eventually having children, but for a human it would not be enough.   Humans have been given the power to choose between better and worse. 

An animal might run to protect itself from danger or alternately, it might stay and fight an attacker to protect its young or its pack.    Either way, natural instinct decides what it chooses.   But humans are diferent because while they might feel the same instincts to protect itself or others, the human has to choose which would be better in this situation, and then try to do it.

Such choices come up all the time in the life of any human, and habit helps us do easily what would be better to do.   It would be difficult to live for even a day if you had to think through every single thing -- how to do it, whether it would be better to do it this way or another way.

Yet it's also important to sometimes think through things and decide whether to replace an old habit with a new one.   This is another thing that animals don't do, but humans have to do to avoid staying immature forever.  Maybe you used to be afraid of going to sleep in the dark, so you always had a nightlight, but one day you decided you were too old for that.  You start switching off the light at night and pretty soon you have a new habit.  

Some habits are more important than others.   If you have a habit of lying or sneak-attacking people, this matters more to your ultimate human life than whether you put on your left or right sock first.    Habits that are objectively bad, contrary to virtue, are more important to deal with than habits that are just useful or useless.   

St Paul, in the quote above, reminds us that all actions should be measured as to whether they are for the glory of God.   Maybe it doesn't seem important how you eat or drink, but offering every action to God can give worth to even the smallest action.

St Therese said :

To pick up a pin for love can convert a soul."

To DO:

If you haven't finished reading OUr Goal and Our Guides pages 48-66. read some more.