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

by Justin Whitmel Earley

The point is, as he put it, “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

we have a robust explanation of how our unconscious habits fundamentally reshape our hearts, regardless of what we tell ourselves we believe.

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?

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.

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?

Words create new realities.

I would wake to the prayers someone else wanted me to pray.

Often one of the only ways to take hold of the mind is to take hold of the body.

This is because no matter what our profession is, work is where we make something of the world.

It’s all tov.

The evening brings me face to face with the reality of my limited life.

The evening, then, can be a time of severe self-judgment.

When our exhaustion gives way to our addictions, we’re exposed for who we really are.

No one can sleep while believing that she needs to keep the world spinning. But real rest comes when we thank God that we don’t need to, because he does. Thus we kneel by the bed and place the period of God’s mercy and care for us at the end of the day.

Our schedules need to be bent around the common table.

Opening the household table on a regular basis creates an undercurrent of the Christian life that mimics the adoption ethic.

A redeemed table is one that invites outsiders in.

We must disrupt it with a presence.

The truth is that we live in a culture where most people are remarkably resistant to hearing verbal proclamations of the gospel. What’s more, it seems some of them really can’t hear it. We no longer share a common vocabulary for communicating whether truth exists, what can be called good, and what love means. But that is okay. God is not alarmed. Our secular age is not a barrier to evangelism; it is simply the place of evangelism.3

What’s more, our great hope is to consummate this presence. In the kingdom to come, God will look at us, and we will look back. In his gaze, we will find the definition of our own lives and indeed the definition of all things. That is why, for a Christian, presence is the heart of everything.

but it will never multiply our presence.

Am I too distracted to actually serve my neighbor?

Here is the power that lies in vulnerable friendships: together we beat back the darkness by exposing it to light.

The darkness rages in us, but honest conversation is a practice of light. And the incredible thing about light in the dark is that the light always win.

We know this because the friendship of the Trinity did not generate less love but more love.

The good life doesn’t come from the ability to choose anything and everything; the good life comes from the ability to choose good things by setting limits.

The point is leaning into the lack, and this can be done in many, many ways, all of which are radical acts, especially in America.

It’s clear to me now why God answered me with silence that night. Silence is the hallmark of the vulnerable. They are vulnerable for many reasons, but this may be the main one: When they call, no one answers. And it’s not because they can’t talk, not because they don’t have something important to say. It’s because we have slanted the system to drown them out. The tapestry of justice is torn in just the right way to obscure their voices.

The fact is that there is a particular sort of “it doesn’t have to be this way” suffering that goes on in dehumanizing material poverty. It’s the way it is because we have made it that way.

He

let the world break him so it doesn’t have to break you. He rose from the grave so all your aspirations won’t end in the

This was the morning I realized that failure is not the enemy of formation; it is the liturgy of formation.

When we trip on failure, do we fall into ourselves? Or do we fall into grace?

Curating a Beautiful Life Living a single, coherent life is one of the greatest dreams of human beings. In this sense a life of integrity is not about moral performance but simply about the pleasure of becoming one person. We long to be an integer, to be whole; instead, we are fractions of contradictory selves.