A Mother’s Rule of Life {Post 2}

Those within the Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christendom may know what a “Rule of Life” is because of their background. But it seems to me that a perfectly obvious question for a Protestant to ask is, “What is a Rule anyhow?” Thankfully, the second chapter of A Mother’s Rule of Life answers this question for us.

A Rule of Life is a traditional Christian tool for ordering one’s vocation. Found most often in religious community life, a Rule can also be used by laypeople–whose state in life is no less a calling from God. It consists primarily in the examination of one’s vocation and the duties it entails, and the development of a schedule for fulfilling these responsibilities in a consistent and orderly way.

Later, we are also informed that

A Rule of Life is not just a schedule, not just a collection of activities organized into a set pattern for efficient repetition. A Rule is an organization of everything that has to do with your vocation, based on a hierarchy of the priorities that define the vocation and done with the ettent to please God. It deals with the essential responsibilities of your state of life, organized to ensure their fulfillment.

So is a Rule of Life a schedule or not? Well, yes, actually. It is a schedule. But it is a specific kind because it is designed not for doing what we want to get done, or the tasks on our to-do lists, but for living out the life God has called us to. It attempts to capture our vocation in such a way that we stop losing little bits {or big chunks, if you are where I’ve been at certain points in my life} of it through the cracks of time.

There is another side of the Rule in that as we use it to fulfill our calling: it is supposed to make us holy.

This was interesting to me because before I started reading this book, a group of us discussed the post Idealized Domesticity over on Google +. I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps this post was missing something small and beautiful in the grind of everyday life. More than that–perhaps it was excusing missing something small and beautiful.

It was just a thought, and I’d actually like to get into this more in another post. For now, we’ll stick to an explanation {to the best of my ability…ahem} of a Rule.

Making a Rule of Life begins not with a sheet of paper broken into hours, but a plain sheet, upon which we map out the details of our vocation. For instance, because I am the keeper of this home, there are certain things I need to do, such as laundry, cleaning, etc. As the educator of my children, there are lessons to plan and lessons to correct and don’t forget lessons to give! As a wife to my husband, I might have emails to check, mail to send, or phone calls to make—not to mention setting aside time to nurture our relationship. As a Christian, I need to spend time in prayer and reading God’s Word. And so on and so forth.

The challenge for me, however, is going to be separating the essentials from the nonessentials. Sometimes I have a hard time making distinctions between the two. I have nonessential pet projects that I often favor over essentials. I bet all of you know nothing about that sort of thing.

All of us will look similar to the extent that our vocations–the things we are called to–are similar. But even if you are like me and you are called to be a Christian, a woman, a wife, a mother, a teacher, a daughter, and so on and so forth, it’ll still be different because the human element is never consistent.

As an example of a working rule which embodies a vocation, Pierlot chooses Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. Here is the schedule she gives:

What I found fascinating was Pierlot’s explanation of this simple schedule:

The two primary goals of the Missionaries of Charity are love of God and love of neighbor, as found in the poorest of the poor. Their time is allotted to fulfill these two aims. Note how the schedule covers a full seven hours for work with the poor and four hours of prayer every day. In addition, all their meals, chores, study, recreation, and even rest are accounted for.

Other than being horrified that they slept less than seven hours per night {from experience I know that I would be ill in no time if I shortchanged my sleep like that on a regular basis–perhaps these are supernuns?}, I found it fascinating that the schedule was designed to fulfill their calling. They have two goals, and then practical needs, and all of that is factored into the Rule. This was amazing to me because I never looked at a schedule from this point of view. There is an extent to which my schedule naturally fulfills my vocation. But too often I have left things out, only to scramble to do them whenever I find the time, which sometimes means they are not done when they ought to be done.

I have always resisted what I call “over-planning.” Whenever I have tried to make for myself a very specific schedule, I can never follow it. But I think this is because it never made room for the human element {known also as preschoolers}, not because the idea of planning to fulfill my duties was a bad one.

I’d like to hold up a different schedule, as a completely different example. I doubt that Charlotte Mason called her daily rhythm a “Rule,” and yet I see how she organized her day in order to fulfill her calling. We wonder how this woman had so much wisdom and filled so many volumes with her precious words, serving as such a gift to those of us following in her footsteps a century later, and all I can say is that she planned it that way. I think she knew she was called, and her entire life was lived deliberately–intentionally.

According to Simply Charlotte Mason, this was Charlotte’s schedule:

Again, we have an unmarried, childless woman, and yet we can see how her own “Rule” produced her self, how it was an embodiment of her calling. She made room for rest, because an exhausted teacher is not a very good one. She lived what she expected of her students {including the time spent out of doors}.

Obviously, our “Rules” are going to look very different. And yet I see how both of these Rules helped make these women acquire the level of excellence for which they are remembered.

It was interesting when I was listening yesterday to the 2011 CiRCE talk by Andrew Pudewa called Reflections on Redeeming Repetition. In his talk, Pudewa tells a story in which he has posed a question about dancers to his godchildren. Who has the most freedom? The one with the perfectly choreographed routine? Or the one who goes out and does whatever she wants to do? Pudewa tells us that the two older children thought that the one who did whatever she wanted to do was the most free. But the little five-year-old boy says that it is the one who was choreographed. Why? “Because she could be great.”

We sometimes forget that it is most often choreography which brings about greatness, that those of us who fly by the seats of our pants {something I’ve done more than I care to admit–sometimes by ignoring my own perfectly good plans} are usually the ones wondering how these other women are so amazing. We marvel at excellence, but we are usually not willing to admit how much of it was planned in advance.

Oh, sure, there are gifted geniuses among us. But I’m talking about average people like you and like me. {Mainly me.} If I want to be great–excellent even–at this gig God gave me, maybe I should check out my plans and see if they even begin to cover all the bases.

In my next post, I want to go on a tangent and discuss the ideas of finding holiness, beauty, sanctification, and reward in our calling, using the post I linked to above as a jumping-off point for discussion.