I’ve heard the notion of “you become what you worship” spoken of from a lot of different sources lately. I’m curious as to why I never heard this growing up. Maybe I did and just wasn’t paying attention. I’d really like to see specific examples of this explored more. It seems like a really good (and useful) spiritual principal. Since we all end up having a distorted view of God, do we “become” like this false image? I guess it’s mostly an image of him being not as truly good as he is. Or maybe or more defined one, like an image of our own father.
Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes a dead thing. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing. The contemplative also, who seeks to keep God prisoner in his heart, becomes a prisoner within the narrow limits of his own heart, so that the Lord evades him and leaves him in his imprisonment, his confinement, and his dead recollection.
-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.14 Sec.3
So what’s the point? To discover if this is the root of some of my own failings and sin. Then changing this image may be the doorway out, as opposed to just striving harder to be a “good person”, which as we all know, doesn’t really work.