Don’t go to the woods. Go to church.
Christianity Today recently published a good essay on Rules of life from Myles Werntz and a review of Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder.
While Myles and I share similar concerns about the rule of life trend he also brings the wisdom of St. Benedict and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to bear on the topic in helpful ways. But it suggested a different place where I sense rules of life might lead us astray. When I read Practicing the Way I came away with the feeling that the Rule of Life was more baseline for who you were than your entanglement with reality. Others might be able to read and see Rules like that as a musical scale from which we improvise from, but they turn the elements of the ordinary into distractions from living the Rule. On top of that I have also listened to Comer enough to hear his advice mirroring that of the self-optimization advice of Andrew Hubermann or Joe Rogan but in more minimalism therapeutic way than those figures. You can even get a Masterclass from Comer himself on The Way Of The Teacher. At the start of the review Myles connects some of the rule of life to recent trends but I have a hard time not seeing it the way Freya India describes some of modern life in this interview with NS Lyons:
Human connection is messy, it’s unpredictable, we fall in love in weird and incommunicable ways. And sometimes it’s not a perfect, rigid routine that makes you productive—it’s the messy, unplanned morning waking up next to someone you love. Sometimes it’s the chaos of your kids clambering into bed with you that inspires you to be better, not the morning breathwork or perfectly timed caffeine shot to activate your adenosine system. I saw a tweet recently that was the perfect example of this. This young guy shared his Patrick Bateman-esque morning routine: journaling, red light therapy, breathwork, meditation, gym, ice bath, sauna, reading, all in perfect silence. No interruptions; no spontaneity. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it, but it’s just not the kind of lifestyle you can have with other people around. Watching it, my first thought was, wow, if this is the ideal, no wonder young people are delaying marriage and having children. We’ve been told that the meaning of life is self-actualisation, to achieve some perfect state of mental health and productivity. Don’t commit until you have perfect control. But I think that way of thinking will backfire. Because the end point of trying to control everything is you become like a machine: emotionally detached, hyper-productive, super-efficient…and alone. And eventually, you end up seeing other human beings as distractions, as annoyances. Other people become obstacles. For women, men become obstacles to our healing and mental health. For men, women seem like obstacles to their ambition and self-development. Or vice versa. It all seems like an avoidance strategy to me, everyone trying very hard not to be vulnerable and get hurt.
Other people can become such obstacles to our rules and the rule itself can numb us into going through life as a kind of machine. But here there’s also a connection to the Living in Wonder review and book by Dreher. The author summarizes the book and advice at the beginning and the end of the review as:
First, put down your phone, close your laptop, and turn off the television. Next, begin to pray. Don’t pray just anything; recite the Jesus Prayer, preferably hundreds of times. Now you are positioned to begin your quest. The object of the quest is beauty. Seek to behold divine glory in the work of the Lord’s hands, whether in his creation, icons, or saints. If you have eyes to see, each of these is a mirror reflecting the light of Christ in a dark but not forsaken world.
And at the end:
Maybe you should consider giving his advice a try. Get offline. Go to the woods. Bring a Bible, a candle, maybe an icon. Say the Jesus Prayer without ceasing. Ask for a sign. Ask for the Lord. Ask for power. Then wait—and see what happens next.
My copy of Living with Wonder is coming today so I cannot speak to the content of the book yet, but it seems in both these threads there is an element of get away. Organize yourself, organize your life, go the woods alone, have your own personal sabbath. The review of Dreher’s book stresses that this book might be more of what we need than what in his previous book, The Benedict Option which I think was completed in the follow-up Live not by Lies. While the author sees those books as concerned with sex and politics, it seems to me those books are more grounded in the communal and the togetherness of the church and boundness amid raging floods. I would agree that enchantment and wonder (and rules of life) will be a more popular message but in the end I do not they will us through the flood because we will find we need each other than we can know.
Last time part of my counsel was not to get a rule, get a church. So, this time my simple advice is: Don’t go to the woods. Go to Church.