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This, again, may happen in various manners. First, habit as such may sometimes bring about a general decrease of our sensibility to true values. Man is so fashioned that whatever he experiences for the first time—whatever he has just discovered—is likely to evoke in him a particularly vivid and plastic impression. It need not be his first actual contact with a thing—what we mean is the moment when the true significance of that thing first dawns upon him. After a while, the impression will in many cases tend to fade; familiarity with an object is apt to breed, if not contempt, a kind of indifference. This we cannot but register as the manifestation of a specific and ineradicable human weakness.

To be sure, in regard to many things it really means a gift of divine mercy. Inasmuch as it results in a mitigation of physical pain, of the suffering caused by want, of the terror inspired by perilous situations, the blunting effect of habit deserves to be considered a happy and liberating influence in the lives of men.

Yet, in relation to true values, the power of habit takes on a negative character; because here, no blunting effect should take place. The degree of this unfavorable influence varies according to individual dispositions. The more vividly a person reacts to impressions—the greater his responsiveness to the stimulus of novelty—the more liable he is to the danger of disregarding the perennial relevancy of genuine values, the never obsolescent meaning of truth, and of developing a certain dullness in regard to such values and truths as have become familiar to him. This is especially the case with people who are eager for sensations.

We must deliberately fight this effect of habit by again and again recalling the valid first impression that the value in question produced upon us and thus evoking in our mind its timeless meaning and its never-aging splendor. At least we must always bear in mind that what has lessened our receptivity towards that value is merely deficiency on our own part. On the other hand, by adapting our intellectual judgment of a value and our affective attitude to it, to the evanescence of the vivid impression it has once created in us, we give proof of a deep lack of freedom.

Habit may diminish our gratitude

Nor is this the only form in which the dulling effect of habit can manifest itself; it may also impinge on our gratitude for the gifts of divine mercy. Thankful as we may have felt at first for those gifts accorded to us—a great love or friendship, for example, or our being allowed to live in a beautiful country or again, some special grace of God—all too soon we grow accustomed to them and cease to appreciate them in any adequate degree. We are no longer aware of their character as gifts; our gratitude for them, if not obliterated, has become dormant.

Is not our life a continuous succession of the mercies and charities of God, and at the same time, an incessant display of ingratitude on our part? How scantly disposed are we to sing again and again the litany of the mercies of God; and even though we sing it, how many particular mercies do we not forget! If we take advantage of the inconceivable gift of daily attendance at Mass, of daily Holy Communion—how sadly is blurred, through habit, our clear perception of its being an inconceivable gift!

This deadening effect of habit on our awakeness again means unfreedom. We permit our value-responses to be hampered by the completely illegitimate power of habit. We must combat it expressly by calling to mind on all occasions how great the gift is that we enjoy; also, what our situation was before we had received it and what our situation would again be if it were withdrawn from us.

Habit can dull our sense of the horror of particular sins

Neither should we simply get accustomed to the hard trials imposed on us by God—such as the loss of a beloved person, or again, the state of spiritual dryness. We should certainly bear them in patience, but at the same time