In the Wesleyan Contemplative Order all vowed members make a covenant to live by a
Rule of Life. The term a Rule of Life is simply the traditional phrase for committing to a
set of patterns to guide our lives closer to God.
Why is a Rule of Life important? Having a Rule of life is a recognition that without it,
we are living by an unconscious pattern which rules how we engage with life. Without a
knowing commitment to a God-centered pattern our unconscious pattern is going to be
dictated by the three great temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness, (which are also
addressed in Welcoming Prayer) — our needs for power and control, esteem and
affection, security and survival. The energy that drives these instinctual needs is not bad
per se. These instinctual energies allow us to survive childhood and grow up.
Once we become adults, we have a choice. We can stay on the broad path — that is fail to
recognize this unconscious energy which is dictating our response to life. Or, we can
wake up to see that Jesus in teaching us to repent, metanoia — he is asking us to see in
a new way, to awake to how our ego driven pattern operates and learn to let go of it in
favor of a new pattern, which energizes our life through our divine connection of being
made in God’s image and likeness.
Often a Rule of Life is confused with something like the Ten Commandments which
Christians try to follow as a set of rules or prescriptions in order to be good. A Rule of
Life works just the opposite. As Yoda would say — no try, just do.
A Rule of Life is not in conflict with the Ten Commandments, it just works differently.
Rather than using our ego to try to do what is right, a Rule of Life is about having a
pattern of practices by which we continually surrender to God, so God’s will of what is
right to do comes through us. Then how we engage in our life, what we do in any
situation comes not from our ego, but through us from God. The result of a Rule of Life
is freedom, liberation from trying to do everything right in exchange for the freedom of
being able to totally rely on God’s will for us moment to moment.
Having total reliance on God sounds good, but it is scary as the dickens. Our ego would
much rather stay in control by pretending it knows best what it thinks God wants us to
do. That is why a rule is so important, because it’s through the practices of our rule that
we gradually begin to turn our life over to the care of God so God can do for us what we
with an ego protected, fearful heart could never do for ourselves.
For many of us Centering Prayer is the keystone of our Rule of Life, because we directly
experience that when all thoughts, feelings and sensations drop away, in that emptiness
Grace arises and there is a palpable experience of God’s Presence within us.
Similarly, when we engage in regular practice of lectio divina, we begin to directly
experience that knowing comes not from our trying to figure something out, but from
somewhere beyond within us. So it is with other contemplative practices.
Thus the practices of our Rule of Life gradually build within us a rock solid faith based
not on belief, but on experiences of God — so we can say as Paul did to the Galatians, “I
am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the
life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son.” Or we might say in more
modern psychological language — the practices of my Rule of Life have allowed my
surrender more and more to God and the fruit of that surrender is that Christ has put to
death my ego self and now I live free, engaging with life through Christ-energy coming
through me.
Or, as Symeon the New Theologian said over a thousand years ago this new way of
seeing is a rebirth —
We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies
