What is a Family Rule of Life?
Last week, I began a series of posts I plan to offer this summer exploring the idea of a family rule of life as a way to unify the family, define our priorities, and simplify our routines. But what exactly is a rule of life? In this week’s post, I’m offering a little background on this phrase and what it looks like.
Rule of Life Origins
I first heard the term “rule of life” in relation to Saint Benedict, a sixteenth-century monk. He was born into a wealthy family that very much valued the family unit. They saw the father as the head of the family, and they lived in community with common goals, which inspired his later ideas about a rule of life.
When he was older, he left his family home to study rhetoric in Rome. However, he quickly discovered that his fellow students and he had very different ideas about how to spend their time well. Their priorities leaned more toward partying and living in a way that he didn’t agree with, so he decided to leave that world, and secluded himself in a cave in another part of Italy. It was there, during this solitary existence, that he came up with these ideas, or these guidelines, about the best way to live life. He saw these precepts as a means to grow closer to God, to fulfill the vocation that he felt God was leading him toward, and to live in community with others who shared similar convictions and also had vocations to fulfill. Later, he applied these ideas in his own monastic communities, and they remain in practice to this day. This idea of living in community with guidelines and precepts that are followed by many with a common goal expanded with him, but even those outside of monastic communities have adopted it for themselves as well.
What is a Rule of Life?
So it has become more widely practiced, but what exactly is a rule of life, especially for people who don’t live in monastic communities? Even if we aren’t part of an organized monastic, reclusive, or contemplative community, we’re still part of some kind of community. We’re part of our family. We’re part of our church. We’re part of a homeschooling community. We’re part of our extended family. We’re part of our town, state, country, and so on. We are all part of something. Specifically, however, in relation to Benedict’s rule, I think it applies especially to our families, as it was a way for them to live together peacefully while fulfilling their vocations and accomplishing in cooperation the tasks and routines they felt were essential to living well.
I know at first glance, the “rule” part may seem a little off-putting. Rules are too restrictive, or they just add more pressure to us to try and fit into a schedule or a routine! The freedom that we feel like we need to have can’t exist in rules! But in reality, a rule is something that can allow us more freedom.
In his book Crafting a Rule of Life, Stephen Machi wrote:
“Rather than being a set of laws that forbid us to do certain things, a rule of life is a set of guidelines that support or enable us to do the things we want and need to do.
A rule of life allows us to clarify our deepest values, our most important relationships, our most authentic hopes and dreams, our most meaningful work, our highest priorities. It allows us to live with intention and purpose in the present moment.”
And he paints a picture of this idea in this way in the same book:
A rule is like a trellis which offers support and guidance for a plant, helping it to grow in a certain direction. A rule of life is descriptive in that it articulates our intentions and identifies the ways in which we want to live. And when we fall short of these intentions, the rule becomes prescriptive, showing us how we can return to the path that we have set for ourselves and recapture our original vision.
What Does a Rule of Life Look Like?
I think these ideas offer good inspiration for adopting a rule of life, but on a practical level, what does it look like for us on a day-to-day basis? For this, I’m going to return to the book I mentioned in last week’s post, A Mother’s Rule of Life by Holly Pierlot. Here is how she defines a rule of life:
A Rule of Life is a traditional Christian tool for ordering one’s vocation. Found most often in religious community life, a Rule can also be used by laypeople — whose state in life is no less a calling from God. It consists primarily in the examination of one’s vocation and the duties it entails, and the development of a schedule for fulfilling these responsibilities in a consistent and orderly way.
I know it’s easy to get caught on the “schedule” part, which, again, may feel restrictive. It might, again, feel like a reduction of our freedom, or maybe we even think, “There’s no way I can fit everything that I need to do, or the chaos of our schedule or our routine into a restrictive schedule!” But she goes on to say:
A rule of life is not just a schedule, not just a collection of activities organized into a set pattern for efficient repetition. A Rule is an organization of everything that has to do with your vocation, based on an hierarchy of the priorities that define the vocation and done with the intent to please God.
I would also argue that it’s done with the intent to grow closer to God as well.
In her book To Love as God Loves, Roberta Bondi talks about Dorotheus of Gaza, who was also a sixth-century monk. He came up with the metaphor of a circle, with God at its center, and people moving from the outside of the circle toward the center, closer to God, as they traveled along their spiritual journey. And as they moved closer to God at the center of the circle, the people around them are also moving closer to the center, and to each other.
When I read about this metaphor, Stephen Maccia’s trellis came to mind. I pictured the trellises that are comprised of poles that come to a point, and the plants are trained up each pole where they eventually meet at the top. I imagined my family and I going up those poles toward God at the top, but also growing closer to each other in the process. In this way, a rule of life differs from just another schedule in that it’s also a tool to help us and the people around us grow closer to God and to each other.
Vocation
In her definition of a rule of life, Holly Pierlot also referred to everything that has to do with your “vocation.” When we think of our different tasks, whether that’s being a parent, a home educator, a cook, a chauffeur, a housekeeper, a counselor, or any of the myriad roles we fulfill, these all comprise our vocation. These are the things we’re called to do. So we have to ask ourselves, “What has God called us to do in this life, and what is the best way that we can fulfill that calling?”
We’ll talk about this more in the coming weeks!
