One of the definitions of habit is: “A uniform or costume characteristic of a calling, rank, or function”. We often wear specific clothes (or habits) that generally reflect our role or status in the workplace. Strangers assume simply by sight that a person is a judge, or police officer, or EMT for example by the clothes they wear when working. They are also perceived by others as more professional and better trained as well. Internally, we feel the part by the way we are dressed. We feel professional so thus exude professionalism. In Latin, habit was defined as a state of being. Thus clothes and habits have a shared meaning. Our work clothes help form our professional habits. The saying “clothes make the man” means that the way we appear to others reveals to others our inner character.
Saint Paul uses clothing imagery to describe our relationship with God.
- In Colossians 3: 9-11 he tells us to “put off the old man with his practices and to put on the new man, who is being renewed in knowledge of his creator”.
- In Galatians 3: 27 he wrote “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”
- Finally in Romans 13:14 he wrote, “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provisions for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
What happens when you put on your habit, your costume that is characteristic of a calling? You behave and act in a manner consistent with your role. Saint Paul tells us to put on Christ so we will act in a Christ-like manner.
Maxwell Maltz said in his book Psycho-Cybernetics that our self-image and our habits tend to go together. When we change one, we automatically change the other. He said that habits are literally garments worn by our personalities and that they aren’t accidental. We wear the habits that fit us and that they are consistent with our self-image. When we work to improve ourselves as Catholics, as Catholic inspired leaders, as parents and friends we are deliberately developing new and better habits and we put away our old habits because they don’t fit us anymore.
It’s one thing to know all of this. Perhaps you do and yet it’s an entirely different thing to live it. Instead of actually trashing our our old habits, we have a tendency to keep them around, stored like a comfortable yet ratty sweatshirt from our youth. We do this, you know – come on admit it – just in case our new clothes in Christ get uncomfortable which tends to happen from time to time. We can easily slip into, for a time anyway, the old habits of the less than saintly lives of our youth.
When St. Paul tells us to put on Christ and thus become a new person, many of us experience some level of cognitive dissonance, a conflict of habits between our life of faith and our work that seem to be irreconcilable or at the very least uncomfortable. They aren’t of course. The new habit of Christ helps form the professional’s habits at work.
The new habit of Christ helps form the professional's habits at work.
Lastly, Christ tells his apostles they will have to suffer, undergo persecution, and even to death itself to give testimony to Him, to be an outward sign of Christ. Likewise we cannot take a different path that Christ took. “Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up is cross and follow me.'” (MT 16:24).
We cannot take that new path in our old clothes wearing and living our old habits.
