Rule of Life

Review: Beauty and Resistance

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Cover image of "Beauty and Resistance by Jonathan P. Walton

Beauty and Resistance

Beauty and Resistance, Jonathan P. Walton. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514012284) 2025.

Summary: A rule of life for those engaged in justice efforts in which beauty and resistance flow from a rested life.

Jonathan P. Walton is an effective ministry leader, a gifted communicator, and an advocate for justice. But a few years he was weeping in his car, stressed out and facing physical health issues. He realized he was facing burnout. His passion for God was expressed in resistance. But his heart was starved for beauty. Over a period of several years, he realized he was in need of the “scaffolding” that provided rhythms and practices to nourish his love for a God who was both beautiful and just. Like many activists, he realized that he needed to cultivate the depths of his life to sustain him in the work of resisting injustice. This book is the fruit of that process. He distills what he learned into four rhythms.

Rest: Working out of rest, not for it. He recognized that a component of his drivenness was a reaction to his family background–who he was trying not to be like. He was all about productivity but rest, date nights, and other activities of delight were missing. Walton re-framed his yearly calendar to work out of rest, with practices of beauty and delight for him and his family in every month. This also means facing dissatisfaction, despair, and desperation and bringing it to Jesus. Then he invites us into the light yoke of deliverance and discipleship.

Restore: Replenish your inner life for the work before you. Firstly, sleep was a priority. Then Walton discovered the importance of doing what he delighted in. For example, in his case this included baking and the book includes several of his recipes! It meant writing poetry he gave to his oldest daughter.

Resist: Seek individual and collective flourishing. He states that to be baptized is to be baptized into a revolution. Specifically, the good and beautiful rule of Jesus over all stands against our cultural ways of getting things done. Instead of all flourishing, for some to flourish involves the oppression of others. Walton flourishes in his efforts to resist such injustices through three prayers he prays daily. These are the Lord’s Prayer, The Prayer of Saint Francis, and the Franciscan Benediction.

Repeat: Establish rhythms to be a whole person in fruitful community. Walton uses Lewin’s force field analysis to identify the driving forces and restraining forces he needs to account for in pursuing his desired goals. Out of this, he establishes rhythms of rest, restoration, and resistance to pursue daily, weekly, quarterly, and annually. For the reader, he offers a chart of questions following this template.

Walton also adds another R that may be the first step for many and that is Recuperate. He gives the example of his own recuperation process from foot surgery. Whether physical, emotional, or spiritual, recuperation may be the starting place to take the first steps into the four rhythms.

I appreciated two things about this book. One was that Walton has “walked the talk.” He takes us through what he went through, which has a ring of authenticity. The other is the joining of beauty and resistance, of formation and justice advocacy. Walton shows how the integration of these two aspects into a rhythm of life nurtures a sustainable life. Instead of either burnout or oblivious bliss, Walton offers a model of discipleship in which beauty and resistance nourish each other.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Common Rule Youth Edition

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Cover image of "The Common Rule Youth Edition" by Justin Whitmel Early

The Common Rule Youth Edition

The Common Rule Youth Edition, Justin Whitmel Early. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514010433) 2025.

Summary: Eight spiritual habits or practices for teens and tweens to help them grow in their faith.

I first trusted my life to Christ at age eleven and seriously began following Christ when I was just short of sixteen. I heard a lot about how to become Christian. Then I went on retreats that encouraged me in my faith in Christ. But no one for a long time shared with me about how I might grow in my faith. So, it is with great pleasure that I welcomed the publication of Justin Whitmel Early’s The Common Rule Youth Edition. In additional to seeing how helpful his earlier The Common Rule was with the young adults with whom I worked, I thought, “this is the book I wish I had as a teen follower of Jesus.”

This book is much like his earlier book. He offers eight habits, four daily and four weekly. Two of each focus on loving God and two on loving neighbor. Also, two of focus on embracing the good in God’s world and two of each on resisting destructive cultural influences. They are:

Daily:

  1. Kneeling Prayer morning, midday, and bedtime (Love God/embrace)
  2. One meal with others. (Love neighbor/embrace)
  3. One hour with phone off (Love neighbor/resist)
  4. Scripture before phone (Love God/resist)

Weekly:

  1. One hour of conversation with a friend (Love neighbor/embrace)
  2. Four hours of physical activity (Love neighbor/resist)
  3. Fast from something for twenty-four hours (Love God/resist)
  4. Sabbath (Love God/embrace)

The one difference from the adult version is substituting four hours of physical activity for “curate media to four hours.” This recognizes the need of teens for intense physical activity for both physical and spiritual health as well as the gift of our bodies which our screen-oriented society encourages us to neglect. Also, it does set some boundaries on social media.

A chapter is devoted to each of the eight habits. Early offers an explanation of each habit and then a practical section at the end with “The Habit at a Glance,” “Three Ways to Start,” and “Three Considerations.”

One of the ideas of a “common rule” is to pursue these practices with others and Early offers suggestions for sharing these practices in a youth ministry in church, or with friends in a school setting. He adapts the practices to the lives of middle and high schoolers. He also recognizes that meals together may need to be negotiated with parents and refraining from food should be cleared with them and never be done by someone with an eating disorder.

Early opens the book discussing the value of habit, including the pattern of destructive habits that brought him to create the Common Rule. But what I thought of even greater help is his concluding chapter on failure, something I often struggled with as a young Christian (and still do!). Early suggests that when we fall, we fall into grace. And so we get up and “keep walking toward beauty.” He observes how a life consists of the small daily decisions to get up and keep embracing these habits of faithfulness.

This is not a “silver bullet.” If there is one, I haven’t found it. But I can see how this might be so helpful in a youth ministry, particularly with supportive adults who are also using the rule. And the practices lend themselves to be fleshed out with scripture and prayer resources. Furthermore, these habits temper or replace destructive habits fostered in our culture, offering another way to live. I hope this book enjoys wide use.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Spacious Path

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The Spacious Path, Tamara Hill Murphy. Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2023.

Summary: In our fragmented world, discusses how the idea of a rule of life, not as an ill-fitting structure but an intimate walk of listening and love with Jesus, may bring wholeness into our lives.

Imagine exiting a frenetic Texas freeway for the quiet of a retreat center. In the middle of it is a prayer labyrinth, a circular maze in which one follows a path with turns until one reaches a center, having prayerfully relinquished prayers and concerns along the way, trusting that the path is not a dead end, quieting oneself to listen to Jesus pace by pace, perhaps meditating on promises from God. At the center are benches where one may sit in quiet. Then one exits, reversing one’s path, praying to hold onto whatever the Lord has given as you walked and rested.

Tamara Hill Murphy offers this as an image of a life of practicing the restful way of Jesus through a rule of life. While we want to escape fragmented and frenetic lives, the idea of rule often seems confining, rigid, restricting. Drawing on the teachings of Benedict and the invitation of Jesus in Matthew 11:28-30, Hill proposes the idea of a rule of life as a spacious path, one in which we come to Jesus, learning from him the unforced rhythms of grace, the unforced life of obedience as we take his yoke, walking and working with him. It is a way of listening and safeguarding love for God and neighbor against both license and legalism. It is a way that is both contemplative and communal

Having established this spacious path of listening and love with Jesus and his people, she writes of how we center ourselves and our rule on that spacious path. She explores how we hold both spacious stability and change together within such a rule. We learn that what unites us as a spacious community is that we are the baptized beloved, drawn in all our diversity into relationship with the Triune God through our shared baptism and shared eucharistic table. As we center in Jesus, we learn to relinquish our religious false self–all the pretenses we keep up with each other. At the same time, she writes about discerning safe spiritual leaders, offering valuable principles.

Only then does she focus on settling into a rule. She explores ideas of spacious work with room for prayer and rhythms of work, rest, and sabbath including seven rhythms of sabbath time: sabbath as a day, daily rhythms of work, prayer, rest, scripture, and self care, and similar weekly. monthly, seasonal, annual, and sabbatical rhythms. She then explores how we may walk the path of the church year, and in Tish Harrison Warren’s words, the liturgy of our ordinary days with their routines. All these may be woven into the rhythm of a rule of life.

The final part recognizes that life can upend our routines, our rules of life when unexpected guests call out the practice of hospitality, when we are confronted with injustice in which we are all implicated, and when tragedies like a global pandemic strike. She explores how lament, repentance, and examen help us know the blessing of God in such times. In an epilogue, she proposes five best practices for beginning and beginning again on the spacious path. I love her first: begin and begin again with a rule for rest and prayer.

I found this a book that was “spacious” toward the reader. Murphy shows rather than tells, describing what for her and others life on the path is like, and how we might take our first steps to begin (and begin again) with Jesus. While offering both principles and practices, the sense in this book was of describing what life on the spacious path is like. This seemed to me a winsome and right way to invite people into the practice of a rule of life.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The City is My Monastery

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The City is My Monastery, Richard Carter. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2020.

Summary: A monk moves to the heart of London and forms a community sharing a rule of life and offers a reflective account organized around that rule.

Richard Carter was a monk with the Melanesian Brotherhood in the Solomon Islands, a simple ordered life where he encountered God. Then he answered a call to serve a congregation in the heart of London, St. Martin-in-the-Fields. After a time, he lost a sense of the nearness of God amid the busyness of parish life. After a discernment retreat in Dorset, his conclusion was not to return to the monastic life but that God was saying “the city is your monastery.” So he returned to St. Martin’s with this conviction:

“I needed to discover the simple disciplines that can enable a community to grow: an obedience, a listening, a life-giving rule of life. I discerned that the way forward was to write down a ‘rule of life’ for a community living in the midst of the city. This was the community, at that stage yet to be formed, which now has become known as the Nazareth Community.”

Richard Carter, p. xxv.

This book is about the creation of that rule, the formation of that community, and the life that followed. Carter organizes the book around the rule which has these seven elements:

  1. With silence — to behold
  2. With service — to accept
  3. With sacrament — to gather
  4. With scripture — to ihspire
  5. With sharing — to enrich
  6. With sabbath — to restore
  7. Staying with — to live

The community began with forty-eight members with more to follow. Each is given a cross from made from timber from a wrecked boat on the island of Lampedusa, and becomes a part through a liturgy of commitment.

The book takes each of the elements of rule and devotes a chapter, not so much a description of “how to” as a narrative of the rule in life, written both in free verse and prose and black and white illustrations. We learn about the members of this community including the homeless who sleep on the church steps and the realities of sharing when an all-season sleeping bag bought for camping becomes the sleeping roll of a homeless man.

Here is an example of one of the poems, from the chapter on silence that I particularly liked:

Into the silent world

Into the space beyond the clutter
Into the depths of your heart
As though lowering a bucket to draw fresh water
Like the discovery of the well crystal-clear below the ground
Or becoming the wellspring.

Or like oxygen in the blood of your body
This life flowing through your limbs
Like walking into to a shower of light
The warmth replenishing you through the pores of your skin
Like being unwound
Like being healed
Like being loved
At the very centre of your existence.

Along the way, his own narrative intrudes as a hospitalization leads to a new appreciation of sabbath and prayer. He acknowledges his own need for community and direction, sharing about his twenty year relationship with Fr. Simon Holden, the last retreat they led together, and his last visit, two weeks before Fr. Holden’s death of leukemia. Among his last words, he expresses this longing, “I want to disappear into God’s love. I want the me to become us.”

This is a beautifully written book that makes the case that it is possible for a city, and a parish in the midst of the city, to be a monastery–a community ordered by a common rule and bound together by the love of Christ. If this is what it means for a city to be one’s monastery, I can’t help but finding myself hoping more people hear this call.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Rhythms for Life

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Rhythms for Life, Alastair Sterne. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020.

Summary: An approach to spiritual practices and a rule of life tailored to the unique identity, gifts, calling, and roles of each person.

Rhythms for Life joins an increasing field of books exploring spiritual practices and the idea of a rule of life. The author even includes a list of these books for further reading. What, then distinguishes this book?

I would contend that it is the first half of this book, coupled with the second half. The first half explores who has God made us to be. Sterne explores in successive chapters 1) identity, 2) gifts, talents, and personality, 3) virtuous values, 4) roles, and 5) vocation. The chapter stood out to me, defined as what we consider important and worthwhile, differentiating aspirational and actual values, how values are formed and transformed in Christ, and how we identify them.

Each of the chapters in the first part include a “workbook” section at the end beginning with prayer, identifying descriptive words that resonate, and asking a variety of questions to help one tease out and reflect on oneself. Doing this together in a group and inviting others to confirm or challenge your insights can be helpful.

The second part focuses on developing rhythms to live out our vocation based upon what we’ve learned about ourselves and our vocations. Sterne proposes four types of rhythms: 1) Up–Upward to God, 2) In–Inward to Self, 3) With–Withward in Community, and 4) Out–Outward in Mission. In these chapters there are brainstorming questions at the end of each section, rather than at the end of the chapter. Each of these chapters concludes with a sample set of rhythms organized around regular and seasonal rhythms and a growth rhythm.

In addition to the appendix on further resources, there is one on develop rhythms in community, and one on discerning a call to ministry.

Books have been written around the content in the first part. Others have been written around the practices of the second. What is unique is the idea of developing a rule of life around the self-knowledge gained in the first part. This sounds great in theory but I found the book short on ideas of how this translates in practice. Perhaps it just follows from working through the exercises. My own sense is that this is done best either with a spiritual director or a community of those who know and trust each other.

What is of value, it seems to me, are the insights gained by working through the first part of this. Knowing ourselves and knowing God walk hand in hand. And perhaps that helps us face honestly whether our spiritual practices are helping us engage with God and his calling in our lives.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Common Rule

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common rule

The Common Rule, Justin Whitmel Earley. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2019.

Summary: Offers an alternative to the habits of our technological world that make us busy, distracted, anxious, and isolated by proposing a set of habits enabling us to live into loving God and neighbor, and into freedom and rest.

Justin Earley was a well-intentioned, missional Christian with ambitious goals who found himself having panic attacks and self-medicating with pills and alcohol and other destructive habits. A life of busyness shaped increasingly by technology was undermining his health and relationships. He recognized that he was being shaped by a set of cultural habits, ways of being that left him busy, distracted, anxious, and isolated. He saw that these habits were not only shaping his schedule; they were forming his heart. Along with some friends, he identified an alternate set of daily and weekly habits that they thought were consonant with their shared faith. He began sharing these with others, and eventually, in conversation with a pastor, realized that he and his friends had rediscovered an ancient practice going back to Augustine and Benedict of living under a rule of life, hence the name they adopted, The Common Rule.

The Common Rule Consists of four daily and four weekly habits. Two of each of these focus on loving God, and two on loving neighbor. Also two of each focus on embracing the good in God’s world, and two of each focus on resisting destructive cultural practices, even as we pursue a life of love. The eight are:

Daily:

  1. Kneeling Prayer morning, midday, and bedtime (Love God/embrace)
  2. One meal with others. (Love neighbor/embrace)
  3. One hour with phone off (Love neighbor/resist)
  4. Scripture before phone (Love God/resist)

Weekly:

  1. One hour of conversation with a friend (Love neighbor/embrace)
  2. Curate media to four hours (Love neighbor/resist)
  3. Fast from something for twenty-four hours (Love God/resist)
  4. Sabbath (Love God/embrace)

After introductory chapters explaining the rule, one chapter of the book is devoted to each habit, explaining the rationale for each habit and concluding with practical instructions for practicing the habit. He concludes the book with the observation of art critic Michael Kimmelman that the greatest work of art is the “curating of all of life as a single witness to something grand” (p. 162). Earley then applies this to the work of habits in our lives. He writes:

“I believe that paying attention to the work of habit is similar. 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” (p. 163).

The book concludes with an extremely helpful set of resources for individuals or groups (Earley believes it is especially helpful to practice these disciplines with others who voluntarily enter in so that individuals can encourage each other). The resources include the habits in a nutshell, a guide to trying one habit a week, trying the whole Common Rule for a week or a month, ways congregations can use the Common Rule, prayers for those trying the Common Rule, and ways the Common Rule might be used in different walks of life for skeptics, parents, at work, for artists and creatives, entrepreneurs, addicts, and those with mental illnesses.

It may be a small thing, but I appreciated the typography of the book. The medium blue of the cover is used for titles, subtitles, diagrams, quote grabs, and headers, setting this book off from most mono-chromatic texts. More substantively, the practical application of James K. A. Smith’s ideas of cultural liturgies and the early fathers practice of rule of life makes for an inviting book grounded in rigorous thought and tested practice. Couple this with his own vulnerable example, and you have a winsome exposition of the practices that makes you want to start right away. The practices of scripture before phone, shutting off the phone for at least an hour, and curating media were both challenging and helpful for this reader whose life is too dominated by the smartphone. Whether you embrace the full rule, or substitute other practices, Earley’s Common Rule offers an important alternative for people of faith to the ways our technological culture may lure us into frantic busyness, distraction, anxiety, and isolation instead of helping us curate beautiful lives of love for God and neighbor.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.