The Freedom of Discipline: A Rule of Life

(The following is my foreword to Tamara Murphy’s marvelous book, The Spacious Path, which I heartily recommend to you.)

As an Enneagram 5 and an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs personality typologies, I love to be maximally productive and minimally inefficient—and I don’t take failure well. I take the injunction of Psalm 90:12, that we learn to number our days so that we may attain a heart of wisdom, and I turn it into a campaign to be stupendously prolific in Jesus’ name.

Add to this the fact that, as a perpetual late bloomer, I always feel as if I’m playing catch-up with my peers on the professional front. Whatever project I’ve recently completed never feels good enough. So the only thing to do, in order to feel better about myself, is to get on with the next.

I’m tired all the time. I resist all invitations to slow down. I don’t, in fact, make the most of my days but only become anxious about the seeming waste of them. And I can’t figure out how to escape the software that’s running in my brain that compels me to keep driving harder.

I need help.

I hear Jesus tell the crowds to come to him if they are weary and heavy-laden so that he might give them the rest that they need, and to take up his yoke because it’s easy, but I don’t think I’ve ever really believed him. What does a “yoke” even look like?

It looks like a Rule of Life.

But as someone who grew up as a conservative Protestant in a largely Catholic country, when I heard the word “rule,” I instinctually heard “dead rituals” and “papist” impositions upon the free spirit of the evangelical at heart.

But I also think that many of us Protestants today, as I did then, overestimate our capacity to will the right thing. Sheer willpower, in actual point of fact, has an expiration date.

We wish to be free of “religion” so that we can be given over to “relationship,” but instead of being truly free, we find ourselves beholden to impossible metrics of religious success and oppressive expectations for spiritual productivity that invisibly but inexorably govern our deepest desires.

We also underestimate the power of liturgies, in the sense of a rhythmed and ordered way of life, to orient our wills, along with our hearts and minds, toward the good by way of our bodies.

What we need, then, is something far more comprehensive than our usual quiet times and pep rallies for Jesus. We need something like a Rule of Life, which might yoke our whole selves to a graced pattern of work and rest, play and prayer, silence and service, fasting and friendship.

But without skilled guides like Tamara Murphy to instruct and inspire us in this new way of being in the world, many of us will likely give up. It’s simply too demanding for individuals to embrace on their own.

And this is one of the many gifts that Tamara offers to her readers in her book, The Spacious Path: Practicing the Restful Way of Jesus in a Fragmented World (Herald Press, 2023). She offers herself, not as one who “has arrived,” but as one who is continually “on the way.” She offers herself as a gentle voice, not a nagging one.

And she offers herself as an honest co-pilgrim, rather than a patronizing one, for she repeatedly acknowledges all the ways that she has failed her own Rule. And in acknowledging such failure, she gives her readers refreshing permission to fail without shame and to try again.

“Always we begin again,” Tamara writes, quoting Saint Benedict.

My sincerest hope is that you will find here as much encouragement as I have to try out a Rule of Life and to trust that the spacious, but disciplined, way of Jesus in such a “rule” is the way of deep rest that your body and soul deeply long for.

And if you fail, do take Tamara’s advice to heart: be gentle with yourself, as Jesus himself is gentle with you. You can always try again. In fact, that just might be the whole point of the Christian life: that we get to keep trying, and in so doing, to discover that Jesus is right there, with us, in the trying.