On writing a Liveable Rule of Life: The Three-Stranded Braid

Over the years, I have written a lot here about how to write a Rule, what makes such a Rule "liveable", what I look for (or suggest dioceses look for) when reading a Rule. Throughout these posts, I have grown both in my appreciation of the importance of the task of writing one's own Rule, and in the way a truly liveable Rule aids the diocese in the discernment of an ecclesial vocation and readiness for or the prematurity of public commitments. I have also grown in my appreciation of the formative power of the very act of writing such a Rule, and sharpened my own sense of the journey a Rule should reflect and how it should function in assisting the hermit to continue to ever-deeper union with God. My concern has always been with what constitutes a liveable Rule because some Rules are clearly inadequate to the burden a liveable Rule must bear while others function for the whole of a hermit's life as a source of inspiration and empowerment in coming to live the silence of solitude not only as context, but as goal and charism of the solitary hermit life.

That last sentence is important because it points to the way a Rule really functions in the life of a hermit as her journey to union with God deepens and intensifies. As I have written over the years, really liveable Rules work first of all to remind us of our own story and the way God is and has been at work in that story. Of course, they can demonstrate not only how we understand the elements of canon 603, but they will also demonstrate implicitly how we have grown in embodying these elements (and the canon itself). As noted, they serve to inspire us when life gets difficult, and we wonder if we have discerned rightly about eremitic life (especially in this form)! They can "slow us down" when we are discerning possible avenues within the Church for ministry, study, living arrangements, and so on, and they will help empower us when the next step forward seems too daunting for us or when illness strikes, and our energy levels are low. Even more foundationally, Rules and the act of writing a truly liveable one over time can assist one's diocese in discerning with the hermit whether or not she is called to live this vocation in the name of the Church, as well as whether one's petition for admittance to profession or consecration is timely or premature.

Several images will be familiar to readers; these capture some of this and including trellises, stair banisters, and maps or topographies (a more adequate image than map). A newer and important image summarizing what a Rule includes is that of a three-stranded braid. Each strand is critical, fundamental, while it is the whole braid that makes a Rule strong, liveable, and the vocation a gift to the Church. Those strands are 1) a sense of one's personal story, 2) an intimate understanding of the elements of canon 603, and 3) a sense of the ecclesial nature of this vocation.  The first strand need not be extensive (this is not an autobiography, after all), but it does need to be present and function like the key signature in a piece of music functions. That is, it will set the key in which everything else moves forward, sounds, and makes sense; it will allow one to articulate throughout the entire Rule, "why this vocation and no other?" Especially, it will allow those discerning with the hermit, and the Church more generally, to see the redemptive thrust of this vocation in one's life. That is, it will allow the way God is working in one's life through and within this vocation to become clear not only to oneself (this kind of writing always functions in this way), but to those discerning with one on behalf of the Church

The second strand involves the constitutive elements of canon 603. One should understand these on their face. What does it mean to speak of the silence of solitude, for instance, or stricter separation from the world and assiduous prayer and penance? How does one live religious obedience or religious poverty, for example? What does supervision by one's bishop look like and mean? However, these constitutive elements also function to provide access to the deeper world associated with c 603 as well. I sometimes speak of the canon as a topography of a journey one is making to ever-deeper union with God. The constitutive elements serve as doorways to or windows on depth, ultimacy, and Mystery. They are like facets of a gem, each of which allows one to enter into its depths and explore a reality that "the world", with all of its distractions and illusory character, obscures and may even deny. They are significant (meaningful) landmarks of a very specific and inner journey. An intimate knowledge of the constitutive elements of c 603 will include some sense of both of these levels of meaning. (These correspond to and allow the hermit to demonstrate not only her own story but the way God has been at work in a solitary eremitic context.)

The third strand is less easy to describe. It includes, first of all, a sense that this vocation belongs to the Church before it belongs to the individual hermit. It will include a sense of the way eremitic life represents the heart of the Church, and how hiddenness functions therein. It will at least begin to demonstrate how the solitary eremitical vocation allows the hermit to serve in Christ as intercessor for the Church and world, and how it is that a journey to deeper union with God in Christ locates a hermit right where genuine intercession takes place. Here is the place where the Rule as Gospel rather than Law really assumes its full weight, and the redemptive thrust of the hermit's life and vocation achieves its full depth and clarity. This is the strand in which the hermit recognizes most fully that c 603 is a gift of God entrusted to the Church, a gift the Church entrusts to the hermit after sufficient discernment, and a gift that the hermit lives exhaustively so that the Church might truly be the Church she is called to be. It is a gift that the hermit in her hiddenness returns to the Church and lives for the sake of God, the Church, and the salvation of the world.

A profound sense of this third strand takes time to develop, and beginners will not likely be able to articulate all of the ways this vocation is an ecclesial one in their first (or even their second) Rule of Life. Even so, in the Rule they provide for profession, it needs to demonstrate some clear sense of this quality in the way it treats the issues of assiduous prayer and penance, supervision by one's bishop and/or delegate, avoiding individualism in all its forms, and serving the salvation of the world, for instance. Other dimensions of this vocation's ecclesiality will emerge over time, as well as in accompaniment by one's spiritual director, one's conversations with one's delegate, and with the diocesan formation team and bishop. Still, it needs to be a substantive part of the hermit's Rule because it is an element that allows the life to be coherent and witness appropriately to both Church and World -- even as it protects the hermit from individualism, misguided autonomy, and so forth.

Feast of the Baptism of Jesus

 Of all the feasts we celebrate, [today's] feast of the baptism of Jesus is one of the most difficult for us to understand. We are used to thinking of baptism as a solution to original sin instead of the means of our initiation into the death and resurrection of Jesus, or our adoption as daughters and sons of God and heirs to his Kingdom, or again, as a consecration to God's very life and service. When viewed this way, and especially when we recall that John's baptism was one of repentance for sin, how do we make sense of a sinless Jesus submitting to it?

I think two points need to be made here. First, Jesus grew into his vocation. His Sonship was real and completely unique, but not completely developed or historically embodied from the moment of his conception; rather, it was something he embraced more and more fully over his lifetime. Secondly, his Sonship was the expression of solidarity with us and his fulfillment of the will of his Father to be God-with-us. Jesus will incarnate the Logos of God definitively in space and time, but this event we call the incarnation, encompasses and is only realized fully in his life, death, and resurrection -- not in his nativity. Only in allowing himself to be completely transparent to this Word, only in "dying to self," and definitively setting aside all other possible destinies does Jesus come to fully embody and express the Logos of God in a way which expresses his solidarity with us as well.

It is probably the image of Baptism-as-consecration and commissioning then, which is most helpful to us in understanding Jesus' submission to John's baptism. Here, the man Jesus is set apart as the one in whom God will truly "hallow his name." (That is, in Jesus' weakness and self-emptying, God's powerful presence (Name) will make all things Holy and a sacrament of God's presence.) Here, in an act of manifest commitment, Jesus' humanity is placed completely at the service of the living God and of those to whom God is committed. Here, his experience as one set apart or consecrated by and for God establishes God as completely united with us and our human condition. This solidarity is reflected in his statement to John that together they must fulfill the will of God. And here too Jesus anticipates the death and resurrection he will suffer for the sake of both human and Divine destinies, which, in him, will be reconciled and inextricably wed to one another. His baptism establishes the pattern not only of HIS humanity, but that of all authentic humanity. So too does it reveal the nature of true Divinity, for ours is a God who becomes completely subject to our sinful reality in order to free us for his own entirely holy one.

I suspect that even at the end of the Christmas season, we are still scandalized by the incarnation. (Recent conversations on CV's and secularity make me even surer of this!) We still stumble over the intelligibility of this baptism, and the propriety of i,t especially. Our inability to fathom Jesus' own baptism, and our tendency to be shocked by it because of Jesus' identity,  just as JohnBp was probably shocked, says we are not comfortable, even now, with a God who enters exhaustively into our reality. We remain uncomfortable with a Jesus who is tempted like us in ALL THINGS, and matures into his identity as God's only begotten Son.

We are puzzled by one who is holy as God is holy and, as the creed affirms, "true God from true God" and who, even so, is consecrated to and by the one he calls Abba --- and commissioned to the service of this Abba's Kingdom and people. A God who wholly identifies with us, takes on our sinfulness, and comes to us in smallness, weakness, submission, and self-emptying is really not a God we are comfortable with --- despite three weeks of Christmas celebrations and reflections, and a prior four weeks of preparation -- is it? In fact, none of this was comfortable for Jews or early Christians either. The Jewish leadership was upset by JnBp's baptisms generally because they took place outside the Temple precincts and structures (that is, in the realm we literally call profane). Early Christians (Jewish and otherwise) were embarrassed by Jesus' baptism by John --- as Matt's added explanation of the reasons for it in vv 14-15 indicates. They were concerned that perhaps it indicated Jesus' inferiority to John the Baptist, and they wondered if maybe it meant that Jesus had sinned prior to his baptism. And perhaps this embarrassment is as it should be. Perhaps the scandal attached to this baptism signals to us that we are beginning to get things right theologically.

After all, today's feast tells us that Jesus' public ministry begins with a ritual washing, consecration, and commissioning by God, which is similar to our own baptismal consecration. The difference is that Jesus freely accepts life under the sway of sin in his baptism, just as he wholeheartedly embraces a public (and one could cogently argue, a thoroughly secular) vocation to proclaim God's sovereignty. The story of the desert temptation or testing that follows this underscores this acceptance. His public life begins with an event that prefigures his end as well. There is a real dying to self involved here, not because Jesus has a false self which must die -- as each of us has --- but because in these events his life is placed completely at the disposal of his God, his Abba, in solidarity with us. Loving another, affirming the being of another in a way which subordinates one's own being to theirs --- putting one's own life at their disposal and surrendering all other life-possibilities always entails a death of sorts -- and a kind of rising to new life as well. The dynamics present on the cross are present here too; here we see only somewhat less clearly a complete and obedient (that is, open and responsive) submission to the will of God, and an unfathomable subjection to that which human sinfulness makes necessary precisely in order that God's love may be exhaustively present and conquer here as well.