Creating a Personal Rule of Love
In contemplative practice, our foundation is always the grace of being.
Recently I led a day of reflection for an ecumenical group of lay ministers. Our theme was “Creating a Personal Rule of Life.” Inspired by the covenants that govern monastic and other religious communities, a personal rule of life is an individual statement anyone can create to express their aspirations for a disciplined and regular spiritual practice. It’s almost like a personal mission statement for the mystical life.
As I was preparing for this event, I recalled a book I read years ago, called Wishcraft. As the punny title implies, it’s about the “magic” of achieving one’s goals, although its advice is actually quite down to earth. One point the author of that book made was to assert that writing down your specific goals put you much closer to actually achieving them than if they were simply fond ideas in your head.
In fact, researchers at California’s Dominican University studied the correlation between writing goals and achieving them; their findings suggest that people who write down their goals on a regular basis are 42% more likely to achieve them than those who don’t. 1
Now, here’s the catch: the spiritual life is not about setting and achieving goals — or, at the very least, that’s not the central point.
We can get so caught up in creating a spiritual task list that it can actually be deeply counterproductive. If we turn the invitation to a deeper spirituality into a set of obligations and must-obey rules, we can actually set ourselves up for a subtle kind of resistance — if not outright rebellion.
Spiritual practices such as Centering Prayer, the Daily Office, lectio divina, and Ignatian/imaginative prayer are like any other discipline that we can undertake: sooner or later, the novelty wears off. What initially feels like an exciting commitment can eventually turn into a kind of pointless drudgery.
The real heart of a spiritual rule of life is not a list of action items to complete every day (or every year) — even if it is, indeed, helpful to have a clear sense of how we want to be disciplined in our spiritual life. But far more important than the to-do list is what I might call the to-love list: or maybe the to-love statement.
Spiritually speaking, a personal rule of life is a statement of love. We love God. We love our neighbors. We love ourselves. We love the earth and even those we find difficult to relate to. Any commitment we make to our regular practice only makes sense when it is an expression of our commitment to love.
The contemplative life prioritizes the grace of being over the necessity of doing (even though the doing may be very important indeed). So when it comes to creating a personal rule of life, choose the being of love first, and then the doing a disciplined spiritual life will sort itself out, sooner or later. If love leads, discipline will follow.
