Trade up your resolutions for a rule
A resolution can't bear the weight of your hopes for the good life
That’s a shiny new year lying around the corner — 365 calendar squares of unmarked living. It shimmers with so much possibility and potential. Who knows what might happen in those days? What sort of life might unfold in 2025?
Giving voice to our deep heart desires, this time of year we regularly reflect on our lives and set out to live differently, resolving to make changes and live better. These resolutions are genuine expressions of hopeful agency, an ache for the good life we want to be living. They are healthy longings and it’s wise to name them. But isn’t there something altogether crazy with this whole exercise when studies show that six weeks later, 80 percent of people have either broken or forgotten them?
A resolution simply can’t carry the freight of our deep hopes.
The problem with resolutions isn’t their foundational longing for growth and change but their blind optimism. We figure wanting a change and naming it will somehow produce the change (psychologists Janet Polivy and Peter Herman call this the false-hope syndrome). But intent and desire need help because resolutions always run up against our habitual human nature.
The modern life script we are handed is one of unbridled individual freedom and autonomy — you do you. Cue the Frozen soundtrack with Elsa belting out, “No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’m free.” Trouble is living this vision (myth) of unlimited freedom is something we humans are proving to be extraordinarily bad at. We are now more anxious, over-weight, in debt, and lonely than ever before.
No matter how free and unencumbered we insist we are, in reality we humans are such creatures of routine and habit. Knowingly, but mostly instinctively, we crave and create meaningful patterns to our living. We simply can’t enjoy the freedom of life without a form or pattern, some skeletal structure on which to hang the flesh of our days. And the problem with New Years resolutions is that we don’t have the the eco-system of habits and practices in play to produce the good life we desire.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Every one of us already has a repertoire of habits and practices in place — some intended but most unnoticed. It’s this current infrastructure of practice that has produced the life we are now living. And it’s that habituated way of life which will produce the same results, despite the blip of a few weeks of early winter resolve.
Then there’s the myopic individualism in all this resolution-making which only accelerates the demise of the whole January project. Most of our resolutions are solo projects, assuming you can do this alone. We’re willfully blind to how inter-dependent we are. Seriously, if you could have accomplished these life changes alone, you would have done it already.
So as you look ahead to a new year, can I invite you to step back a few hundred years for a bit of monkish wisdom — take your new years resolutions and trade them up for a rule of life (you can read a few earlier posts on a rule of life here, here, here, here, and here).
A rule of life (sometimes called a regula) formed the heart of monastic communities, providing a common way to live out the good life. A rule of life is an intentionally curated pattern of Christian practices, habits and disciplines. In essence, a rule is a structure. You could think of it as a crutch, a support for people who limp but want to grow in lives of obedience and Christ-likeness; it’s for those who know their need for a practical, everyday pattern of habits to shape daily life.
Most people associate a rule of life with monasticism but theologian Simon Chan notes, “Living by a rule is what turns one into a regular Christian.” This is not elite Christianity or super-hero faithfulness. What’s in sight is regular Christianity (rooted in a regula, a rule) – the ordinary living out of everyday faith, the small acts of prayer, service, devotion, and love cultivated through and trained by a rule of life. As St. Benedict put it, a rule of life is a tool that makes “the very radical demands of the gospel a practical reality in daily life.”
A few years ago I completed doctoral work exploring how a rule of life might shape a church community in our contemporary world. In my work as a pastor, I knew something was off in how the church was forming (or not forming) disciples. The evidence showed a church not making regular and resilient followers of Jesus nor forming God’s people in community and as a people.
A lack of information was not the problem (we have more Christian resources available to us now than ever before). We are missing the shared patterns for shaping regular Christians and missing the kind of community that lives, supports and reinforces these practices.
The support structures - habits and disciplines of Christian living - that once shored up faith had been dismantled, lying now in the scrapyard of secularism. Yet nothing had replaced them. In my doctoral project, I spent time exploring the church’s history (seeing how some form of rule has been present in scripture and the church’s history) and experimenting with current-day disciples on how a rule of life can function as a renewed formation architecture to grow a shared and distinctive Christian way of life.
For the past 7 years, I've been leading a small community living out such a rule together. The rule of life we’ve crafted in the Habitus Community involves daily and weekly practices such as prayer, scripture, digital disengagement, sabbath, hospitality, friendships, fasting, and silence.
This all seems small and slow doesn’t it? But we’re dealing with the reality of our human nature, and these practices take time to do their work in us; they won’t immediately give us the life we desire. I tell people in our community that the initial one-year commitment they make isn’t long enough - best to think more like 4 to 5 years to see some of the fruit of Christ in us. But like the flow of water that smooths and carves stone, these practices slowly shape a life of communion with God, a life in which you will know yourself as beloved.
People participate in the Habitus Community by making a year-long commitment to live out our common rule of life (many people continue on for successive years, recognizing after one year they’ve only begun to catch the rhythm of this way of life). We begin during the summer months, inviting people to try on three core practices (daily prayer, Sabbath and daily digital detachment) and also to prayerfully discern God’s invitation into this community. Then in September we begin to set in place the remaining practices of our rule of life, rolling them out one per month. So when January hits (and everyone else is sketching out various resolutions) we calmly go about doing what we’ve taken a few months to set in place — slowly practicing a new way of living, orienting our schedules and living around communion with God.
A central part of the Habitus rule of life is community. You can’t join or participate alone. You need to find two others to do this with you, forming a trio, a micro-community. Following Jesus is never a solo spirituality project. We’re meant to be formed in community and as a people.
We are a dispersed community, with members in both Canada and the U.S. (even a trio in Germany) and from coast to coast. My personal dream is for every church to have a rule of life community at its center, a small group of Christians devoted to the recovery of regular but radical Christianity, seeking the renewal of the church and its mission in the world. But for now, Habitus is giving dispersed groups of people an experience of living by a rule of life. Hopefully one day they might replicate something like it in their home church community.
I know June 2025 is a ways off but perhaps this is the year to ditch the resolutions and opt for the vintage wisdom of a rule of life. Perhaps participating in a community like this this might fit into the goals or hopes you set out for this coming year.
If interested, I’d encourage you to visit our website. I’m happy to have a conversation with you about Habitus if you have any further questions. Or check out this article to hear about how a rule of life is helping people reconstruct a living faith.
However you enter the new year, praying God’s richest goodness for you.
May the peace of the Lord Jesus go with you wherever he may send you. May he guide you through the wilderness protect you through the storm. May he bring you home rejoicing at the wonders he has shown you. May he bring you home rejoicing once again into our doors.
(From Common Prayer)