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

by Justin Whitmel Earley

What if true freedom comes from choosing the right limitations, not avoiding all limitations?

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.

habits mean spending meaningful time with other people. They encourage us to interrupt our busy schedules for the sake of rhythms of community.

These habits are designed to help us spend our days for the sake of others, rather than just ourselves.

Should we do nothing, we will be taught to love the very things that tear us apart.

The habits of resistance aren’t supposed to shield you from the world but to turn you toward it.

For most of my life, I’ve been framing the day with a sense of what you may call legalism.

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

These are prayers that make the world less about us and more about the love of God for us.

The first kind of prayer names a reality that is.

The second kind of prayer is not simply naming what is but creating what can be.

But our default morning prayers are usually broken versions of one of these two. We name false realities, or we create ones that shouldn’t be.

Beginning the day in kneeling prayer is such a keystone habit. In morning prayer, we frame the first words of the day in God’s love for us,

I found that I was by default beginning the day by speaking the words of my pride or fear into each day. Framing the day in terms of me was effortless. I wanted to change that, but changing habits of the mind is immensely tricky. Thoughts are slippery things. We can’t grab them. Actually, we can’t even touch them, and they often happen before we know it. Hence their power. They are the unnoticeable emotional water we swim in that ends up shaping everything.

The second step was to kneel. Often one of the only ways to take hold of the mind is to take hold of the body.

Kneeling prayer midday is a chance to acknowledge that inexorable tendency and to reframe the day right as it is falling apart.

My short prayers for midday often have to do with a confession that I’ve made my work about me.

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

There are more or less healthy ways to escape, but what I can’t escape is the desire to escape.

Thus we kneel by the bed and place the period of God’s mercy and care for us at the end of the day.

You say your prayers until your prayers say you.

We were made to feast. Not in order to become full, but because we are full. We are to celebrate that fullness by feasting.

In a world of suffering and death, one of our greatest temptations is to rehearse the fall again and again through food. We eat to try to fill our emptiness.

When I fast I see that deep down I’m not actually a very patient person after all. I’m not actually a very content person after all. I’m not as independent and strong as I thought I was. I’m a weak, impatient, angry person who medicates with food and drink. This is painful to confront. Yet to live without fasting is to live without knowing who I truly am.

But fasting is a habit of breaking that comfort in order to seek true comfort instead.

A man who works with his mind should sabbath with his hands, and a man who works with his hands should sabbath with his mind.

Focusing and finishing are the two great glories of work.

We seem to have come to a point as a culture where we praise the acts of being inhuman as acts of being a great human.

But the rest that our souls need is not simply a nap. It’s the rest that comes with realizing we don’t have anything to prove anymore. We don’t have to prove we’re important.

This is why we live in a culture that can’t accept sabbath; we do not believe that work is from God and for our neighbor. Instead we believe that work is from us and for us. It’s something we pursue to become who we want to become. Our careers define us. This is the American dream. We can work our way to significance. This is what we’re doing when we prove our busyness to ourselves and each other; we’re trying to show that we matter, that the world wants us, that the world depends on us.

sabbathing is much more about doing than not doing. It’s about doing restful things.

If you’ve read any of this book thinking you can muster the good life out of a few daily and weekly practices, you’re reading it backward. Love has first come to us. Anything and everything else we do comes after. All these things are simply a response to this astounding love.

Place habits before love, and you will be full of legalism, but place love before habits, and you will be full of the gospel. God’s love for us really can change the way we live, but the way we live will never change God’s love for us.

Seamus Heaney poem—this line of the psalm had “come at me sideways / And caught my heart off guard and blew it open.”

failure is not the enemy of formation; it is the liturgy of formation. How we deal with failure says volumes about who we really believe we are. Who we really believe God is. When we trip on failure, do we fall into ourselves? Or do we fall into grace?

It is best thought of as giving attention to the art of habit. It isn’t about trying to live right; it’s about curating a life. It is the art of living beautifully.

The connection between the ordinary and the extraordinary is through very small habits. Small things build up to great works of art. Limits often pave the way for new kinds of beauty.