The Common Rule | Embrace + Resist Weekly: Christ Fills

" ... The question 'Is there anything you aren't telling me?' gets at the heart of friendship, because friendship is being known by someone else and loved anyway. ... " + The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

This is the final post of 3 reflecting on how to receive our days and weeks as gifts and blessings to share with others (the 1st and 2nd can be found here: The Common Rule: Discovering the Freedom of Limitations + Embrace + Resist Daily: Habits of Light & Presence Is Life). We'll continue with what we can embrace weekly and how this helps us resist in order to love well.

"Embrace + Resist Weekly in Order to Love Well" excerpts adapted from Justin Whitmel Earley's The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose in an Age of Distraction

Embrace is a reminder that there is much good in the world God made. God's presence — not his absence — is the primary foundation of the world. That we need each other — not that we harm each other — is the primary truth of being human. In the habits of embrace, we try to train our bodies and our hearts to love God as he actually is and to turn to our neighbor as we were made to do. The habits of embrace are: sabbath, prayer, meals, and conversation.

Resistance is when we acknowledge that evil and suffering are very real, though they aren't how the world was made to be. Our world is full of a thousand invisible habits of fear, anger, anxiety, and envy that we unconsciously and consciously adopt. Should we do nothing, we will be taught to love the very things that tear us apart. So we must take up the fight, open our eyes to the way media form us in fear and hate, the way screens form us in absence, and see the way excess and laziness train us to love ourselves above all else. But remember that resistance has purpose: love. The habits of resistance aren't supposed to shield you from the world but to turn you toward it. They aren't so you can feel good about what you've done for you. They exist so you can feel peace about what God has done for you. The habits of resistance are: fasting, Scripture before phone, phone off, and curate media.

Embrace Weekly Habit 1: Ways to Start the Weekly Habit of One Hour of Conversation with a Friend

Without communication, there can be no community. ... That is why conversation, discussion or talk is the most important form of speaking or listening. + Mortimer J. Adler

Something much more personal floated about the room. It was an unspoken question: Is there anything you aren't telling me? That is the question that goes either unasked or unanswered in so many lives that collapse. Often, if honestly asked and honestly answered, this question can turn whole lives around. Secrets feed off going untold, and darkness exists only where there is no light. ... Vulnerability and time turn people who have a relationship into people who have a friendship. That's what friendship is: vulnerability across time. The practice of conversation is the basis of friendship because it's in conversation that we become exposed to each other. ... There's nothing more terrifying and redemptive than removing the fig leaf and telling who you are to a friend. It's terrifying because we are never who we wish we were. It's redemptive because that's at the core of enacting the gospel in communal life. Friendships embody the power of the gospel in a unique way, because in friendship we live out the truth of the gospel to each other. What is the gospel besides that Jesus knows how broken we are and sticks around to love us anyway? What is a friend except someone who knows how broken we are yet sticks around to love us anyway?

The fundamental truth of friendships is not that love is limited but that love is infinite. We know this because the friendship of the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Spirit did not generate less love but more love. By virtue of making us like him, God in creation expanded the circle of friends. Jesus now calls us his friends, and by saving us, he invites us into the dance of the Trinity. The circle of love is open and expanding. The nature of true friendships is not to shut the outsider out, it is to draw them in. ... Opening outward is the truest direction of friendship. The circle grows. Here one plus one equals three or even four. The circle is complete, but it is somehow still open. Love defies mathematics and geometry. If friendship is a practice that reminds us of what the gospel is, it is also a practice that puts the gospel on display to the world. In a culture of loneliness and individualism, there is no better witness to the Trinity than embodying a counterculture of real friendship.

Standing meeting. Try setting up a standing time with a friend — such as every Thursday evening or every Friday morning — when you always get together. Don't be discouraged by the fact that sometimes you have to miss; be encouraged by the fact that the rule is getting together, and the exception is missing it sometimes.

On telling secrets. Tell your secrets. Do it tonight. It will change your life and will probably inspire your friends to tell theirs too. There's no bigger catalyst for deep relationships than telling your secrets.

The power of good questions. Often great conversations come from someone who has mastered the art of good questions.

Resist Weekly Habit 1: Ways to Start the Weekly Habit to Curate Media to Four Hours

Stories as Formation

We become the stories we consume. The Latin root of the word decide — cise or cide — is to "cut off" or "kill." The idea is that to choose anything means to kill off other options you might have otherwise chosen. That day I realized that by choosing one story, I would have to cut off other stories. I had to choose one thing at the expense of many, many other things. I would have to choose carefully. I would have to curate my stories (see Story of God: Creation, Crisis, Covenant, Christ, Church, (New) Creation).  

Creation: Our story begins with the creation of the world. Eden is the opening scene of a movie in which everything is the way it's supposed to be.  

Crisis: And then we're hooked by tragedy: the fall of humanity and the separation of humans from God. Then there's the chase, the conflict.

Covenant: How will God rescue his people? He shows his love for them in the Old Testament's dramatic scenes of romance, in tracking them down through deserts, and saving them from war. And then the plot thickens.

Christ: Just when things couldn't get worse, we find out that God will not just come for his people; he will become his people. Jesus is the archetypal hero who comes in to save the world. But he won't save the world by fighting; he will save it by dying. 

Church: The gospel is tragedy: Humanity will be saved, but God has to die. But there is a twist. The resurrection defies all expectations. Evil is defeated, and good will reign.

(New) Creation: God will win after all, and love will prevail. There is a new time coming, and the kingdom will have no end. 

The gospel moves — in the words of Presbyterian pastor and author Frederick Buechner — from tragedy, to comedy, to fairy tale. The point is this: We don't just watch stories, we live in one. We are characters in the most epic narrative of all time, and it is real. It is a story unfolding in actual time, and the stories we watch are all trying to explain to us what this real story is about. They help us figure out how to live in our own story. When the Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas argued that story is "the necessary grammar of Christian convictions," he was saying that the Bible isn't primarily a moral message on what is right and wrong; it's a story of how God is saving us. We can't understand morality from situation to situation unless we first understand the story we're in, who the hero is, how we are being rescued, and from what. 

In On Moral Fiction, John Gardner wrote that a good story beats back the chaos of the world. A good story shows us that there is some kind of world with beginnings and endings, where things happen — and happen for a reason. Stories convince us that things are, after all, going somewhere. That's why stories more than any ethics lecture shape our idea of what the good life is, where the world is going, and what it means to be human. They tell us what is beautiful, what is just, and how we should live with each other. This is why we don't just watch stories. We become them.

Now, we don't choose our stories nearly as much as they choose us. Should we do nothing, someone else's stories will curate our lives for us. If we don't cut off their options; they will cut off our options. ... The good life doesn't come from the ability to choose anything and everything; the good life comes from the ability to choose good things by setting limits. Limits are where freedom is found. We don't need unlimited choices; that actually limits our ability to choose well. We need a limit on our choices, which actually empowers us to choose well. By limiting stories to a certain number of hours in a week, you introduce the ability to choose them well. Curation implies a sense of the good. An art gallery has limited space on the wall, so its curator creates shows to make the best use of that space according to a vision for good art. I suggest we have a vision for good stories, and we curate accordingly. We could start with curating for beauty, justice, and community.

Stories matter so much that we must handle them with the utmost care. Resisting the constant stream of addictive media with an hour limit means we are forced to curate what we watch. Curating stories means that we seek stories that uphold beauty, that teach us to love justice, and that turn us to community.

A time audit. Track your media watching for a week, and then set an hour goal for the next week that is four hours, or some other reasonable number you feel comfortable with.

Make great lists of great stories. Keep a running list of great movies, shows, or podcasts to listen to. One of the best ways to curate stories well is to encounter great stories. They change us. They both satisfy us and make us hungry for more great stories. Often novels or movies that have stood the test of time are the best places to start. Notice also that the written form resists addiction because of the time you have to put into it. Balance your media by also reading a great novel or biography.

Curate with others. I choose better when I choose in public spaces. For that reason, I keep a program on my computer that shares my entire internet history with a couple other close friends. The point here is to figure out what helps you curate the best and to notice that usually we curate worse when we curate in private.

Resist Daily Habit 2: Ways to Start the Weekly Habit to Fast from Something for 24 Hours 

Eating Away Our Emptiness

In a world of suffering and death, one of our greatest temptations is to rehearse the fall again and again through food. We eat to try to fill our emptiness. This is why fasting is mentioned so often in the Bible. Fasting is a way to resist the original sin of trying to eat our way to happiness and to force ourselves to look to God for our fullness. In that sense, to fast is to lean into the truth of the world: we are empty without God. "Man does not live by bread alone" (Deuteronomy 8:3).

In fasting, what begins with experiencing the emptiness of our stomach ends in experiencing the emptiness of the world. In the Bible, fasting is not just to reveal and clarify our own need for God. It is to lean into the suffering of the world itself and to long for God to redeem it. This is why the Israelites during the time of Esther fasted; they knew the brokenness and injustice of the throne they lived under, and they longed for God to redeem it.

This is partly why Jesus fasted before he began his ministry. He was sent to undo the fall, and his forty-day fast was an act of longing for the world to be restored by his ministry to come. He emptied himself in a bodily prayer for the world's fullness. In this way, fasting tracks the plotline of all things. We must be emptied in order to be filled. Christ denied his body so we could partake of his body. The weekly habit of fasting, then, is a way to lean into both the emptiness of the world as it is and prayer for the coming fullness of the world as it will be. The world doesn't end in fasting, of course, but in a feast. Above all, we fast because we long for the wedding supper of the Lamb.

Christ in the Emptiness

Even when the prayers aren't answered (or at least in the way we thought they could or should be during fasting), in the space that fasting opens up, we find something else: Christ. He is the one who can and will fix all of this, and the one we are to be with while we make an effort to do the same.

In emptying ourselves, we practice becoming like Christ, who emptied himself. We practice sharing in his sufferings. It isn't on the mountains of triumph and victory but in the valleys of sorrow and loss that he waits for us. ... It is possible to be a people who avoid our exile within America and constantly lean into assimilation into our culture. We can easily forget that the place of friction, persecution, minority suffering, wilderness, emptiness, and hunger — that is the place where Jesus is. Fasting, as a practice, is a way to enter into Jesus' life. He was a homeless, hungry minority. He was a refugee and an outcast. He was actually — not just metaphorically — poor. He lived among violence. He died violently. To follow Jesus is not just to believe in his life; it is also to follow him into his lifestyle. And that idea runs hard against my usual expectations of being American. It's hard to be poor in a land of plenty, and it's hard to be hungry in a land of sugar. It's hard to be empathetic in a land where we hide the poor on the other side of the interstate. But fasting is a habit of breaking that comfort in order to seek true comfort instead. We continue to fast because that's where we find Jesus — right on the fault line of the beautiful and the broken. The miracles we see in fasting are amazing. And the brokenness we enter into in fasting is unbearable. This is, I suppose, why the practice of fasting is a beautiful and painful reminder of a good world cracked by the fall. Cultivating the habit of fasting as a way of life means cultivating an understanding of why beauty and brokenness intertwine in the present world. I know of no other way of life that can both acknowledge all that the Lord has done and still yearn for all that we desperately long for him to do.

Sundown to sundown. My preferred fast begins at sundown on a Thursday and ends with a communal breaking of the fast at sundown on a Friday. This is a great way to do twenty-four-hour communal fast with friends. Also, usually just skipping meals doesn't lead to prayer. I find that I need to take walks instead of eating to actually pray.

Start with a meal. If fasting intimidates you, a great place to start is just skipping a meal — maybe lunch — and replacing it with prayer. If you do it with family, skip your family meal so you can pray together. 

Communal fasting. I find fasting far rich in community — not to mention it's so hard to muster the discipline when it's just me doing it. Consider having a text or email chain going among people who are fasting so you can share encouragements and prayers. Also consider doing an initial prayer time together and/or breaking the fast together.

Multiple days. I've also had difficult times where fasting for multiple days was the way to repentance. There's something unique about the state the body and soul enters into on longer fasts, and I would recommend working toward them as an occasional practice.

Embrace Daily Habit 2: Ways to Start the Weekly Habit of Sabbath

The Restless Soul

This is why we live in a culture that can't accept sabbath; we do not believe that work is from God and for our neighbor. Instead we believe that work is from us and for us. It's something we pursue to become who we want to become.

Our careers define us. This is the American dream. We can work our way to significance. This is what we're doing when we prove our busyness to ourselves and each other; we're trying to show that we matter, that the world wants us, that the world depends on us. But the gospel wants to put that to rest. We don't have to work like that because Jesus has done that work for us. And he has finished it. The book of Hebrews tells us that God has entered into his eternal rest, which is another way of saying that God has entered his full sabbath, because his work is done. This is because God has not only finished the work of creation, now in Jesus he has finished the work of redemption too.

When the project went wrong because of our sin, God came in to fix it in the form of a baby. When Jesus came to live and die among us, he came to finish the work once and for all. This is why, in his final words on the cross, Jesus cries out, "It is finished!" What is finished? The work of salvation. In his death and resurrection, Jesus has done everything needed to unite us back to the God who loves us. There is not a single thing to add. But there is everything to receive. The rest beneath the rest is the knowledge that in Jesus all work is finished. This is why Augustine wrote, "My soul is restless until it finds rest in thee." When that's true, we can finally take a day off. We can finally take a nap or stare at a cloud or have a long dinner with friends. "It is finished" is the lullaby of all things, our restless hearts included.

I think of the person of Jesus. We are all looking for someone we trust to look us in the eye and tell us we've done enough, that it's okay to stop. This is the good news of the gospel. ... Here's the truth: we are messed up beyond belief, but loved beyond belief, and that is the one thing worthy of our belief.

If you've lived your life believing that you can earn your worth, that you can earn your salvation by outweighing the bad with the good, that you can justify your place in this world through the money you earn or status you achieve — come and rest! Come and sabbath with Jesus. Here there is peace that no amount of effort can buy: he came to you first. He lived the good life we are all trying to live. He did it all. He sacrificed everything. He always said the right thing. He always knew what to do and where to go. And where did it get him? It got him killed. People hated him. They stripped him naked and killed him. He lived the light of life we're all trying to live, and he was answered with death. But it was all for love. It was all for you! He stayed up all night in the garden of Gethsemane so you could sleep. He finished his work on the cross so you could rest. He let the world break him so it doesn't have to break you. He rose from the grave so all your aspirations won't end in the grave. ... Love has first come to us. Anything and everything else we do comes after. All these things are simply a response to this astounding love.

Pick a 24-hour period. 

Doing and not doing. Write down three things to do and three things you want to avoid. 

Electronic sabbaths. I recommend doing a month of Sabbaths with no screens at all to get a real sense of what it's like.

On Failure and Beauty

It was if someone had laid out a trip wire. I was running full speed through this psalm when I was suddenly cut off at the knees and went sprawling face first onto this line: "One thing I will seek after, to behold the beauty of the Lord" (Psalm 27:4, paraphrase). ... Sin means that my heart curves inward, but the words of Scripture had cracked me open.

Apparently nothing else I ever said about the Common Rule habits was as helpful as talking about failure — because failure is where we live. This was the morning I realized that failure is not the enemy of formation; it is the liturgy of formation. How we deal with failure says volumes about who we really believe we are. Who we really believe God is. When we trip on failure, do we fall into ourselves? Or do we fall into grace? Failure is the path; beauty is the destination. We walk toward beauty on the path of failure. Which is to say that formation occurs at the interplay of failure and beauty. No habits can be pursued for the purpose of success or productivity or a new and better you. They must be done for the vision of beauty. If the goal is self-help, failure will destroy you. But if the goal is beauty, failure makes that goal shine all the more brightly. ... Any process of curating a beautiful life will be laced with failure. That's what process means: learning as you go. But that's not an impediment to a beautiful life; it's the way to it. ... This is the ethic of the search for beauty, which is the only true worship. 

Like the woman pouring perfume on Jesus' feet ... You'll try anything, because you're lost in the one you love.

Here are links to previous City Notes books:

2014 | A Meal with Jesus; The Art of Neighboring; A Praying Life; Building a Healthy Multi-Ethnic Church; Family on Mission; Encounters with Jesus; One Thousand Gifts

2015 | The Rest of God; Everyday Church; Rhythms of Grace

2016 | Letters to a Birmingham Jail; A Field Guide for Everyday Mission; Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith; The Pursuing God; Yawning at Tigers

2017 | Gospel Fluency; Moving Towards Emmaus; Evangelical, Sacramental, and Pentecostal; Faith Without Illusions

2018 | The Eternal Current; Learning to Speak God

2019 | Tattoos on the Heart; Drop the Stones; Preemptive Love; Hermanas; The Ultimate Exodus; The Abbey of the Genesee Silent Retreat Special; Praying Jesus' Prayer Special; Advent Special; Magnificat Embodied

2020 | He Speaks in the Silence; Lenten Special: The Dusty Ones; Christ Over the Coronavirus Special: A Beautiful Disaster; Christ Over the Coronavirus Special: Glorious Weakness; Christ Over the Coronavirus Special: The Common Rule: Discovering the Freedom of Limitations + Embrace + Resist Daily: Habits of Light & Presence Is Life

Next post: Special 2020 City Notes | Bread for the Resistance: Intro, Small Talk, Through Blindness, Big Shoes & Avoiding Burnout

Soli Jesu gloria.

Christ is all,

Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan

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