The Things We Do Without Knowing Why
Reflect
This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. (Mt 15:8)
Meditate
Most of us put on a seat belt without a second thought. We get in the car, hear the click and drive off. We have done it thousands of times. We rarely stop to think about how it works, or why we do it, or how this small, ordinary habit could one day save our life. It has simply become a routine, something we trust completely almost without noticing it at all.
And perhaps that is fine for a seat belt. But our faith is meant to be different. We make the sign of the cross. We say grace before meals. We stand, sit and kneel at Mass. We say "Amen". These are beautiful things, full of meaning — and yet over time many of them can quietly turn into habits we no longer think about. The action stays, and the meaning slips away.
When Jesus says that we can honour God "with our lips" while our hearts are far from him, he is taking up the words of the prophet Isaiah (Is 29:13). Saint John Chrysostom saw in this a warning against hypocrisy — honouring God outwardly while inwardly remaining distant from him. As one early commentary on this passage put it, the Pharisees "honoured him in commending outward purity; but in that they lacked the inward which is the true purity, their heart was far from God, and such honour was of no avail to them." The danger Jesus names is not the outward action itself, but keeping the action while quietly losing the heart that once filled it. God does not desire our gestures alone; he longs for the heart behind them.
Because every one of these practices began as an encounter. Our prayers and sacraments exist because God reached out to us first in love. It is one of the most tender things we can do: to go looking, again, for the person underneath the practice. To encounter Jesus again in all our "automated habits".
"Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction."
Pope Benedict XVI
Deus Caritas Est, 25 December 2005
Act
Pick one small, familiar practice of your faith — like the sign of the cross, grace before a meal, a decade of the rosary, or saying "Amen" at Mass.
- Sit with it for a moment and gently ask: do I know why I do this?
- Search for its meaning.
- The next time, slow down and let your heart catch up with your words and actions.