The Rule Book

It’s Saturday evening, and I’ve still got quite a few things left to do to get ready for tomorrow, which is my long-awaited day at Carmel learning from my Carmelite sisters and brothers.

On Tuesday, we went to take Annika’s cast off at the orthopedic surgeon’s. The idea was to take the cast off, take some more X Rays, and then put the cast back on for another six weeks. Lo and behold when we took the cast off, we discovered through the X Rays that her arm had healed to the point where -- miraculously-- we could keep the cast off entirely so that she could begin to redevelop her muscles in the arm, etc. The doctor was quite surprised. It seems more than one little miracle occurred on the day of the miraculous thumb healing! God is good.

Wayne also had a very promising job interview that day, and we are looking forward to hearing more from them next week.

I’ve been discovering more and more how my Mediterranean heritage is a cultural handicap in the religious debate arena…. Most people, it turns out, are a lot like Wayne and don’t actually ENJOY the arguing and exaggerating (Wayne calls it lying and picking fights) so I’m going to have to work on that not just in the home, but outside as well. It also plays out in my women’s book and bible studies etc. I think I’ve been talking more than listening, and I need to work on that.

My SIL made friends with a nice girl who I’ve now met a couple of times at their house. She and I have a lot in common-- she’s got two children my kids’ ages and we both go to the church, she lived in Italy until this year, likes cooking and natural parenting, and things like that. And yet, no matter what my attempts to win her over are, I can’t seem to really make friends with her. She’s always a bit standoffish, and I hate that she just doesn’t seem to like me. I know not everyone has to, but whenever I meet someone who doesn’t, it really bothers me and I spend a great deal of time wondering WHY not. This may all just be emotional trash I need to sort through from high school when Kiki Lew used to beat me up all the time because she (and I quote) “just didn’t like me.” Nevertheless, I wish people would like, fill out anonymous surveys and put them in my mailbox: I don’t like you because you talked too much, or you chewed with your mouth open, or you are too nerdy. The most likely culprit is that I overwhelm people. I need to work harder to be of a “meek and quiet” disposition.

I’ve been thinking a TON about the rule book concept that Amanda and I always blog about.
As nondenominational ex-Catholic and ex-Mormons, we had to learn to “put away our rule book,” so to speak… to stamp out legalism in all it’s forms. It’s a good idea-- to get away from the idea that adherence to a rule is righteousness, particularly to one’s rules without doing it from the heart, or out of a desire for righteousness and godliness.
We recognized that in the past, we had done things “for the sake of doing them,” and not out of a motivation to really love God and love others. Of course, that motivation came later, and we found ourselves adhering to many of the same rules.
But like good protestants, we trained ourselves to bristle at the idea of “putting rules or laws over ourselves.”

I have a friend who has nine children. During family devotions, if some of the kids are messing around, not really “present,” the parents will tell them to go back upstairs and do what they want to until they WANT to come down and worship God.
On the one hand, I think it’s a good idea to encourage them to be present in the moment and to give God their best. BUT I also think that it discourages discipline-- it demonstrates that our godliness is dependent upon our feelings and not our disciplined lifestyle.

I’ve heard it said many times that if a Jew loses his faith, he should continue to live as a Jew (observe the law) and that eventually, his faith will return. Likewise, I think the same is true for a Catholic--- continuing to do Catholic things will eventually bring one back around to some sort of seedling of faith. But if a person has no law to return to, they are left with nothing. And that, quite frankly, is a very dangerous thing. It seems that in trading in my legalism, I was going so far as to cling to lawlessness too.

Ironically, I felt that I was really balanced in that I allowed myself lots of “wiggle room” in my own spiritual walk. While I would never condemn someone for either NOT drinking, or FOR drinking, for example, I myself drank when I felt I could drink and didn’t when I felt I could not. I thought I was very spiritually mature in that I was neither shackled nor wild, but simply what I would have described to you as…. In faith. I knew that discipline was important for myself, and I was interested in discipline, but I refused to create steadfast rules for myself out of a distaste for legalistic thought patterns.

And yet one of the biggest factors in my return to Catholicism was a frustration with how many rules there were over my head which did absolutely nothing for my soul. When I walked out of my nondenominational church for the last time, it was as if I was physically shedding skin after skin which weighed pound upon pound… my first day at mass I thought I was going to start literally levitating. (Hey, some Catholic saints actually HAVE levitated, now that I think about it!)

In my stepping further away from fundamentalist ideology, I’ve seen how I sometimes react with a type of fear that I’m somehow wronging God when I do something that wouldn’t “Fit in” with fundamentalist theology. I experienced this the first time I prayed a rosary, or prayed before a statue of Mary, or even simply crossed myself.
I felt this very strongly when I was first discerning my vocation to religious life in the various third orders. I was strongly attracted to the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal, the Little Sisters of Jesus, and the Discalced Carmelites. And deciding between them was eventually clear--- there is no third order for the FSR or the LSJ. During that time, I re-discovered my love of the brown scapular, which also gave me the “weird, nervous” feeling that I might be stepping out of favor with God. (that has since TOTALLY been resolved…. Just in case any of you are wondering, I would NEVER purposely do something that I didn’t think was directly from God.)
As I drew nearer to discerning a call to the Carmelite Order, I realized that being in a Religious Order meant that I had to adhere to a Rule of Life. This concept, which was once so familiar to me, had fallen to some distant part of my brain during my protestant years, and when it resurfaced really freaked me out.

For those who don’t know, a Rule of Life is a document drawn up to contractualize a member of a religious order’s faith life -- something that explains what will be expected of them in their daily life, right down to how much they will pray and what they will pray. It’s a rule book.

Which I have incessantly spoken about in here as wrong, evil, etc. And which I have always talked about yearning for!

The Carmelite Rule that I will be living under is the Rule of St Albert. You can google it if you are interested and read it yourself, but the important thing to know is that there are some heavy prayer requirements for each day: things like, 30 minutes of mental prayer (meditation) a day, at least praying the morning and evening prayers of the Liturgy of the hours, daily devotion to the Blessed Mother, etc. It also includes vows of chastity (maintaining purity within my marriage) obedience (to the order and the church) and poverty (not living in excess of wealth but rather using what I need and passing the rest on to do the work of God.)

I get tingles whenever I read this rule. I am currently living under a different Rule of Life, which is from Father Lasance’s My Prayer-Book, an extremely orthodox prayer book with an excellent little Rule with tips like…. Crossing oneself before getting out of bed in the AM and just as you go to sleep in the PM, or remembering to say grace, things like that. Most of these things I do already, but they become ingrained in me as I try to live the Rule and I find it so ironically liberating that I just cannot describe my joy.

See, before I had a Rule of Life I still lived a VERY faithful life. God is and always has been right at the forefront of my mind. However, before I had a Rule of Life, there went entire days where I realized that I had barely prayed at all, whereas now, at the end of a bad day I can say… well, I didn’t do MUCH, but at least I prayed the LOH, and the rosary, etc.

Its’ like re-learning how to pray from a book. At first, it’s totally disconcerting. I get guilty feelings when I pray too much from a book and not enough spontaneously. And yet when I pray from a book, I find so much richness in the prayers--- they are theologically sound, beautifully written , and thoughtful. Letting go of my “consciousness” of what I am saying to God frees me to pray with my heart. And so now, while I still LOVE to pray spontaneously and freely to the Lord and pour out my heart, I am finding great solace in praying the prayers of the Saints, as well. I feel connected to them when I pray their prayers. It reminds me that I’m a part of a big family, and it connects me to God in the way THEY connected to God… for a small moment, I’m a part of their walk.

Who knew that I wanted my Rule book for a reason? My Rule turns out to be good for my soul… I am more disciplined and more in love with God and aware of Him because of it… and suddenly I’m really walking in the footsteps of the Saints, following their advice and learning from their lives. It’s awesome.