The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

by Justin Whitmel Earley

I had no idea how much my life was being formed by my habits instead of my hopes.

We are all living according to a specific regimen of habits, and those habits shape most of our life.

A habit is a behavior that occurs automatically, over and over, and often unconsciously.

The problem is, as Wallace suggested, that much of what is fundamentally shaping our existence is happening unconsciously.

“when a habit is formed, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. The patterns we have unfold automatically.”

This is why to fully understand habits you must think of habits as liturgies. A liturgy is a pattern of words or actions repeated regularly as a way of worship. The goal of a liturgy is for the participant to be formed in a certain way.

Calling habits liturgies may seem odd, but we need language to emphasize the non-neutrality of our day-to-day routines. Our habits often obscure what we’re really worshiping, but that doesn’t mean we’re not worshiping something. The question is, what are we worshiping?

But what if the good life doesn’t come from having the ability to do what we want but from having the ability to do what we were made for? What if true freedom comes from choosing the right limitations, not avoiding all limitations?

I had lived my whole life thinking that all limits ruin freedom, when all along it’s been the opposite: the right limits create freedom.

“Before all things, most dear brothers, we must love God and after Him our neighbor; for these are the principal commands which have been given to us.” St. Benedict’s rule opens declaring that it means to establish “nothing harsh, nothing burdensome,” but goes on to describe walking in God’s commandments as being in the “ineffable sweetness of love.”

The rule of life is intended to pattern communal life in the direction of purpose and love instead of chaos and decay.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”

habits are how we get our hands on our purpose.

It’s high time that this ancient spiritual wisdom become modern common sense. All those who want to be attentive to who they are becoming must realize that formation begins with a framework of habits.

It’s utterly important to learn the right theological truths about God and neighbor, but it’s equally necessary to put that theology into practice via a rule of life. You can’t believe truth without practicing truth, and vice versa. You can’t have a good education without good formation, and vice versa. You can’t know who Jesus is without following Jesus, and vice versa. To live with only one or the other of these things is to live as a half-human being. Only when your habits are constructed to match your worldview do you become someone who doesn’t just know about God and neighbor but someone who actually loves God and neighbor.

I realized the most alarming part of this is not our bad habits, which we tend to know about. It’s our collective assimilation, which is invisible to us.

We have a common problem. By ignoring the ways habits shape us, we’ve assimilated to a hidden rule of life: the American rule of life. This rigorous program of habits forms us in all the anxiety, depression, consumerism, injustice, and vanity that are so typical in the contemporary American life. It’s urgent, then, that we recover the wisdom of crafting a gospel-based rule of life as the new norm for living as a Christian in America today. We desperately need a set of counter-formative practices to become the lovers of God and neighbor we were created to be.

How else do we explain a country of Christians who preach a radical gospel of Jesus while assimilating to the usual contours of American life?

Let us see that habits shape the heart. Let us stop fearing that limits are a threat to our freedom. Let us see that the right limitations are the way to the good life. Let us build a trellis for love to grow on. Let us craft a common rule of life for our time, one that will unite our heads and our habits, growing us into the lovers of God and neighbor we were created to be.

A “rule” is a set of habits you commit to in order to grow in your love of God and neighbor.

Let me tell you what is overwhelming: a default, normal, unexamined American life. That is completely overwhelming. It’s so much to take on, and we all do it simply by not doing anything else instead.

Our world is full of a thousand invisible habits of fear, anger, anxiety, and envy that we unconsciously and consciously adopt. Should we do nothing, we will be taught to love the very things that tear us apart. So we must take up the fight, open our eyes to the way media form us in fear and hate, the way screens form us in absence, and see the way excess and laziness train us to love ourselves above all else.

But remember that resistance has a purpose: love. The habits of resistance aren’t supposed to shield you from the world but to turn you toward it. They aren’t so you can feel good about what you’ve done for you. They exist so you can feel peace about what God has done for you. The habits of resistance are

If we’re to make something of the world, we must begin with words. Just as God framed the world in love, so we can use the words of prayer to frame each part of our day in love.

Legalism is the belief that the world hangs on what I do and that God and people love me based on how I perform. This is an important concept because it’s the exact opposite of the gospel: God loves us not because of what we do, but rather in spite of what we do—in spite of our good deeds and our bad deeds. Legalism takes the unmerited love of God and bends it into something earned—and just like that, the world is about us and not about him.

The first kind of prayer names a reality that is. Like Adam’s work of words in the Garden of Eden, it creates categories of meaning and names realities. This part of prayer is essential as it reminds us there are truths of the world: God is good. We are loved. To be alive is beautiful. Gratitude is the way of happiness. In this sense, prayer agrees with what God has created and reminds us of the way the world is. The second kind of prayer is not simply naming what is but creating what can be. Just as God spoke mountains and soil into existence, so we use the words of prayer as a generative act of wishing new realities into existence. Often this work of prayer happens in the places where the order of creation has been broken: Lord, have mercy! May your kingdom come. Please help! Or, Hold this widow as she grieves her husband’s death.

Habits are something we do over and over without thinking about them. They shape our world effortlessly. They form us more than we form them—and that’s why they are so powerful. A keystone habit is a super-habit. It’s the first domino in the line; by changing one habit, we simultaneously change ten other habits.

Framing the day in terms of me was effortless.

They are the unnoticeable emotional water we swim in that ends up shaping everything.

Here we recover the two uses of prayer, naming true realities: “God, thank you for another day I did not earn. You are so generous to me.” And we are creating true realities: “Let me make something good of the world today. Let me love the world and all the people in it just like you love it.” In the smallest shift, the whole day has been reframed. Now it’s time to get to work.

The Hebrew word that God says over and over is tov, which is something more than just good. It is something like wow or whoa—like the involuntary noise a stadium crowd makes when an athlete does something sudden and spectacular. Tov is the benediction God speaks over his creation, and if we miss that, we miss the fundamental truth that God is caught up in his love of matter and being and creation. In some way, we have to envision God like Jackson Pollock, the modern artist famous for throwing paint. God is slinging materials around, throwing paint at walls to see what sticks, and saying, “Wow! Tov! Tov! Tov!”

We can’t understand what we’re doing at work until we see that all of our professions are born out of the good work of God.

So we invert the purpose of work. Instead of working as a way to love and serve others, we turn work into a way to be loved and served by others.

I need something physical to mark the moment for my slippery mind.

No matter what I do, the habit always interrupts things in the best of ways. By introducing a new habit, there’s a hook in each day, a place where the focus on self is snagged and disrupted. And I’m reminded that work is not for me but for someone else, so I can turn the rest of my workday toward that someone, whether a client, customer, employee, or stranger.

but what I can’t escape is the desire to escape.

You say your prayers until your prayers say you. That’s the goal.

The need to eat reveals our dependence on God.

The need to eat reveals our dependence on each other.

The need to eat reveals our dependence on creation.

The table is the center of gravity.

Attention is our precious commodity. Our life is defined by what we pay attention to. This means our life is defined by which of the many cries for our attention we heed. If we’re going to take that call seriously, we have to acknowledge that our phones are carefully designed to attract our attention and sell it to advertisers.

To sit peacefully in silence requires knowing your soul, knowing who you really are, and being fundamentally okay with that and at peace with that. This is exactly why we avoid it; we don’t know who we really are. Or if we do, we’re terrified of ourselves. Silence confronts us with that fact, so we will do anything to avoid it.

Who am I? And who am I becoming?

We become what or who we reflect, which is to say we become what we pay attention to. We can’t become ourselves by ourselves. The way we discover ourselves is by staring at someone else.

The monastic impulse in me said I should continue to stay away from social media, but the missional impulse in me said that’s where the neighbors who need the love of God are. I want to acknowledge that both impulses have real elements of truth, many people at different times in life may appropriately choose one or the other, but my time had come. If I wanted to speak love to the world, social media would be one way to have the world’s ears. I needed to learn to speak that language, just as I needed to learn Mandarin to be a missionary to the Chinese.

First, I try to open a media site only when I have need to post or respond.

Second, I avoid unplanned scrolling.

But in general, I believe we should be wary of the flicking thumb motion. The restless thumb often correlates to the restless heart.

Third, I turn off notifications.