Join The Underlines // The Best Of What I Read
A batch of the best highlights from what Joshua's read, .
while both St. Augustine’s and St. Benedict’s rule have all kinds of tiny habits that we might either consider too inane to matter or too strict to be appropriate, we should notice that both of them had the same goal in mind: love. Both were obsessed with taking the small patterns of life and organizing them towards the big goal of life: to love God and neighbor. St. Augustine’s rule began with this sentence: “Before all things, most dear brothers, we must love God and after Him our neighbor; for these are the principal commands which have been given to us.” St. Benedict’s rule opens declaring that it means to establish “nothing harsh, nothing burdensome,” but goes on to describe walking in God’s commandments as being in the “ineffable sweetness of love.”
The Common Rule
Justin Whitmel Earley
So we invert the purpose of work. Instead of working as a way to love and serve others, we turn work into a way to be loved and served by others. Instead of longing to hear the “Tov!” of God, we work for the “Tov!” of people. And this is only the beginning of our brokenness; sometimes we actively labor to hurt people. Not only is the world complex and hard to manage, but evil abounds. Whether it’s a competent bookkeeper working in the field of sex trafficking or an otherwise talented manager writing an email specifically intended to produce guilt and shame in an employee, often human work actively cultivates evil instead of love.
The Common Rule
Justin Whitmel Earley
Notice how similar the definition of liturgy is to the definition of habit. They’re both something repeated over and over, which forms you; the only difference is that a liturgy admits that it’s an act of worship. Calling habits liturgies may seem odd, but we need language to emphasize the non-neutrality of our day-to-day routines.
The Common Rule
Justin Whitmel Earley
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