The Common Rule Quotes

“This was the morning I realized that 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?”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Habits form much more than our schedules: they form our hearts.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“when a habit is formed, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. The patterns we have unfold automatically.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“We were made to feast. Not in order to become full, but because we are full. We are to celebrate that fullness by feasting. Feasting to fill the emptiness is not feasting; it is coping.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“But the more I use social media, the more I realize that the great danger is not in simply overusing social media, it is in living through social media. The problem is not so much the way it wastes time, it is the way it frames time. Without limits, we begin to see our whole life through it. We see our whole day through a possible post. We look around, wondering what in our field of view is worth taking a picture of. We listen to every conversation for a tweetable quote, instead of trying to understand the human being who is talking. We avoid disagreement in public, yet we express our most ardent emotions in carefully crafted Facebook replies or all-caps tweets.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“The daily habit of one meal a day with others is a way of moving the table back to the center of who we are and ordering our day around the kind of people we were created to be: dependent and communal human beings.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Use your phone one way, and it fuels the life of love and presence you long for. Use your phone the other way, and it robs you of everything you were made for. But remember that the phone isn’t neutral. We can’t use it the right way without habits that protect us from the wrong way. When we do nothing, they tilt us toward absence. This is why we must cultivate habits that resist absence—because we were made for presence. Cultivating the daily habit of turning your phone off for an hour each day is the keystone habit that can change the way you think about your phone and spark new daily routines that usher in a life of presence.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“All those who want to be attentive to who they are becoming must realize that formation begins with a framework of habits.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Anger and fear have something in common: we become the center of things.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“I was standing amid floor-to-ceiling shelves of books in wonder and awe when my view of stories suddenly and forever changed. There were enormous piles of books lying in corners. Books covered the walls. Books even lined the staircases as you went up from one floor to the next. It was as if this used bookstore was not just a place for selling used books; it was like the infrastructure itself was made up of books. There were books to hold more books, stories built out of stories.

I was standing in Daedalus Books in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I had recently read Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. I was alive with the desire to read. But at that particular moment, my glee turned to horror. For whatever reason, the truth of the numbers suddenly hit me. The year before, I had read about thirty books. For me, that was a new record. But then I started counting. I was in my early twenties, and with any luck I'd live at least fifty more years. At that rate, I'd have about 1,500 books in me, give or take.

There were more books than that on the single wall I was staring at.

That's when I had a realization of my mortality. My desire outpaced reality. I simply didn't have the life to read what I wanted to read.

Suddenly my choices in that bookstore became a profound act of deciding. The Latin root of the word decide—cise or cide— is to "cut off' or "kill." The idea is that to choose anything means to kill off other options you might have otherwise chosen. That day I realized that by choosing one story, I would have to cut off other stories. I had to choose one thing at the expense of many, many other things. I would have to choose carefully. I would have to curate my stories....

Curating stories used to be a matter of luxury. Now it's a matter of necessity—and perhaps even urgency.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Scripture before phone Refusing to check the phone until after reading a passage of Scripture is a way of replacing the question “What do I need to do today?” with a better one, “Who am I and who am I becoming?” We have no stable identity outside of Jesus. Daily immersion in the Scriptures resists the anxiety of emails, the anger of news, and the envy of social media. Instead it forms us daily in our true identity as children of the King, dearly loved.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“To follow Jesus is not just to believe in his life; it is also to follow him into his lifestyle.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“I’ve tried to be two places at once, and as a result, I was no place. This is the core struggle of the smartphone. It’s amazing because it allows us to communicate our presence across time and space, but it’s dangerous for the very same reason. It can fracture our presence across time and space until nothing is left. Usually this happens simply by habit, like me talking via phone to my wife while doing two or three other things. We don’t mean to live lives of absence, but without meaningful habits of resistance, smartphones are impossible not to look at. If we do nothing, we’re sure to live a life of fractured presence. And that’s not much of a life at all, because presence is the essence of life itself.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Why is the freedom liturgy so dangerous? Because it perpetuates the slavery to all the other habits—ironically. My life was an ode of worship to omniscience, omnipresence, and limitlessness. No wonder my body rebelled. The freedom liturgy is dangerous for two reasons. First, it doesn’t actually produce freedom. We think that by rejecting any limits on our habits, we remain free to choose. Actually, by barraging ourselves with so many choices, we get so decision-fatigued that we’re unable to choose anything well. Since we’re too tired to make any good decisions, we’re extremely susceptible to letting other people—from manipulative bosses to invisible smartphone programmers—make our decisions for us. The dogged pursuit of this kind of freedom always collapses into slavery, which leads us to the second reason the freedom liturgy is dangerous.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“We all desire to somehow shape our chaotic days into lives with meaning. That begins with punctuating our days with words: the words of prayer.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“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.
As Annie Dillard says, "How we spend our days is of course, how we spend our lives." - Annie Dillard (p. 15)”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Habits are a pattern of repeated action that are ultimately formational (for good or bad, realized or not) and this - ultimately - is worship. Liturgy is simply habit that admits itself to be worship. (paraphrase from pg. 8-9)”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“The end of the world culminates not in clouds and harps, but in a FEAST. At the wedding supper of the Lamb, the divine presence is restored to us over a table of food. (p. 59)”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“He stayed up all night in the garden of Gethsemane so you could sleep. He finished his work on the cross so you could rest. 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 grave.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“The smartphone is a tool that enables many things, but it will never multiply our presence. When we try to use it that way, it only brings absence, and this absence is the cause of much brokenness in the world.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Morning. Spirit, I was made for your presence. May this day be one I spend with you in all that I do. Amen. ■ Midday. Jesus, I was made to join your work in the world. Please order the rest of my day in love for the people you have given me to serve. Amen. ■ Bedtime. Father, I was made to rest in your love. May my body rest in sleep, and may my mind rest in your love. Amen.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“The connection between the ordinary and the extraordinary is through very small habits.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“the ever-outraged and always-offended tone of mainstream news sources is making us numb to the world’s pain. When everything is a crisis, nothing is.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Sherry Turkle describes the way texting and online chatting have threatened true friendship because they allow us to plan and curate the versions of ourselves that we bring to our discussions. When we’re removed from facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice, and when we have time to consider and edit our replies, we don’t face the risk that face-to-face conversation naturally brings. So we don’t risk being known as someone less than perfect.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“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.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“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. For example, I say the Lord’s Prayer every night with my sons because I want the words of Jesus’ prayer to sink down into their bones. I want that prayer to form the contours of their lives. Notice how similar the definition of liturgy is to the definition of habit. They’re both something repeated over and over, which forms you; the only difference is that a liturgy admits that it’s an act of worship. 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?”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Failure is the path; beauty is the destination. We walk toward beauty on the path of failure. Which is to say that formation occurs at the interplay of failure and beauty.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“The fact that we’re made to eat says volumes about who we are and who God is. We are not just hungry bodies, nor machines that simply need fuel. We are hungry souls; we are people who crave the company and the delights of the table. Our need for food says something profound about us. It says we need God, we need others, and we need the created world.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“So every story is trying to make us feel busted up about something and makes us fall in love with a solution. The problem is when they stir up fear over the wrong things or stir up love for broken solutions.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“When we don’t curate for beauty and instead feed a desire for distraction or pick based on messages alone, we miss out on the essential human need to feel the world deeply.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction