Thoughts on the rule

Some time ago I read a book of the letters of St. Jane de Chantel and St. Francis de Sales. Like many books, I no longer own it because I loaned it to someone long forgotten, so I can't look up the citation. In essence, the story went like this; Jane sat down to read her daily office, and one of the children (this was while still raising a family) demanded her attention. She immediately rose to attend to her child's needs. Duty dispensed, she sat down to read and the same thing immediately happened again, she was interrupted before finishing the same sentence. She rose and took care of the duty. This same thing happened seven times, and seven times she rose and did not finish reading the same sentence. When, after seven interruptions, she resumed her reading, the sentence was now embossed in gold! St. Francis de Sales, her spiritual director, advised her that this is because our duties of state have priority over our religious observances, and while praying the office is a duty (in her case), her duties to her children always come first, and so she had acted well and proper and had pleased her Lord who showed his pleasure through that little miracle.

The "rule of life" which we as Lay Dominicans are vowed to follow, is a guideline to sanctity, to help us work out our salvation first and foremost. The rule is an enumeration of "good habits of the spiritual life" in accord with the Dominican charism for those in the lay state. Our motivation to adhere to them needs to conform to what I've provided in the previous post; a pious, filial fear, a love which drives one to desire to please the beloved, our Triune God. We must balance this with the demands of the lay state, and for those who are in the married vocation, family and especially children provide a wonderful chaos against which to balance our practice of the rule; a rule which should never be seen as a burden, but always as a gift to the beloved, a gift which gives more to us than it does to Him.

The struggle, if I may be so bold, is to "fit it in." While this is in some ways the exercise and training of habit, it also is in fixing in our mind, heart, and will, the desire that this is something we have chosen to do, something that is good and wonderful, and, like physical exercise, something that will do us great good. Mostly, though, it is something which will please the One we love, and whom we have chosen to love with a greater and closer intensity than that which has been pledged by baptism and confirmation; a gift of our self to our Lord who gives us what we need to give this gift.

And I think some of the previous post contains essential keys; to do the office when tired and not feeling like it, not because it is required, but because we want to please God, even when it clearly does not please ourself, or make us feel good, is an act of the will stripped of sweetness, and thus of greater merit than doing it when we actually feel like it! There is something here to study and consider.

Perhaps a thought to add is that while the rule is not binding under sin, it should not be dispensed lightly either. Yet the process of conforming our lives to the rule is challenging and part of the learning experience of formation. If we think of the rule as an extension of the concept of the tithe, and consider that our Lord said "Unless your justice exceed that of the scribes and the pharisees (who tithed mint and cumin), you will not enter the kingdom of heaven" (Mt 5:20), we should rejoice at the opportunity to do more for Jesus and his mystical body, the Church.