The Common Rule

Chances are you have been stuck. If you aren’t now, you will be. And that state of stuckness can pervade almost every vocation of our lives. Enter The Common Rule.
This is the beginning of a series about wrestling with life’s distractions by considering habit formation. It’s about how habits can help free us from some of the logjams we get ourselves into. Justin W. Earley’s book The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction will be our conversation partner.

Earley is an attorney by day from Richmond, VA and an author/speaker on the side. I think he’s an Anglican Christian. At the time of this writing, he’s in his mid-30s and in the thick of raising a family. He doesn’t write as one who has arrived but has stumbled upon a way (what he calls a "rule") to harness the distractions that seem to define the age we live in.

He leads off with a chapter called "Discovering the Freedom of Limitations." With a relatable and storied style, Earley pulls us in to a topic that though growing in the popular self-help section of bookstores makes it sound like he’s not inventing something new but dusting off and repackaging old truths. Habits, he says, "are the water we swim in," and they are "liturgies" that shape us. With a simple table, he compares how common bad habits are driven by an underlying "liturgy of wrong belief" (p. 10). He brilliantly traces the symptoms of our rat race back to Eden pointing out that "in trying to free ourselves from our limitations, we brought the ultimate limitation of death into the world. But Christ turned this paradigm on its head…. We, for our own sake, tried to become limitless, and the world was ruined. Jesus, for our sake, became limited and the world was saved" (p. 13).

Jesus leads us to the good life, ultimately. Here, the author lights a burning question: "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?"

Earley’s goal? "We desperately need a set of counter-formative practices to become the lovers of God and neighbor we were created to be." With incisive humility and tender boldness, he exposes our cultural starvation as a lack of love. So, he says: "Let us build a trellis for love to grow on" (17).

"A 'rule' is a set of habits you commit to in order to grow in your love of God and neighbor." Earley claims that what he’s writing about isn’t really anything new: "For thousands of years, spiritual communities have been using the frame of the rule of life as a mechanism for communal formation" (14).
"As the /title of the book/ suggests, the Common Rule is meant to establish communal—not individual—rhythms" (21).
Knowing how intimidating it is to turn over a new leaf, the author assures the new rhythms will "lighten your load." And he suggests some on-ramps by trying the Common Rule either for a month, a week or a season and maybe one or two of the (8) habits. This is wise. You can go straight to the "Resources" section in the back of The Common Rule to get his own abridged version of the book.

In the coming posts, I’ll tease out more of the pith of Earley’s framework for habit formation. But to satisfy some curiosity to keep you coming back, I’ll end by listing out the Four Daily Habits and the Four Weekly Habits he will develop throughout the book.

1. One hour of conversation with a friend
2. Curate media to four hours
3. Fast from something for twenty-four hours
4. Sabbath

Surprising? Probably not. Challenging? For sure. Impossible? Not at all.
Read, Common Rule, Part 2 here.