Yesterday morning while I was making my bed, a question entered my mind. “Why is it,” I queried, “that it is so easy to develop a bad habit and so difficult to acquire a good one?” The answer came as I tucked the sheet and fluffed my pillow.

A bad habit rises out of our passions. In most cases, our disordered passions. Even if the pleasure is licit, lack of self-discipline and restraint makes it negative (shopping? food? gossip? — you get the idea). It is rooted in concupiscence, our natural inclination to sin. And we naturally lean toward it.

A good habit, on the other hand, requires order, constraint, mastery, dying to self. It requires taming unbridled desires and wants through mortification and sacrifice. Taking custody of our senses. Asceticsim. Doing this goes against the grain of our natural desire and so it doesn’t bring us pleasure — at least initially. Therefore, we don’t like it. While we may desire it in theory, we lean back from it in practice.

What, then, do we do? Do we give up and give in? No. That clearly is not the appropriate response.

In addition to praying for all of the supernatural help and grace we need and making good use of the sacraments, we employ the will and begin to reorder ourselves toward the good, the holy, the truly beautiful.

As we do so, we begin to seek a different kind of pleasure — one rooted in the things of God rather than the things of the world. One that seeks the eternal rather than the temporal. One that leads us to truth rather than illusion. One that lifts us up to a new level of knowledge and understanding about God, man, ourselves.

Doing so yields not only good habits with their accompanying virtues, but that which good habits and their virtues bring — happiness. True and abiding happiness. Philippians 4:8.

As we make our way through this Advent season, let us continue to root out that which is disordered and replace it with the virtue opposite to it. By Christmas day we may be well aloong the way to replacing a most pernicious bad habit with a good one. What a gift that would make for our King!