How to write a rule of life
Not a schedule, not a set of resolutions, and not a plan for the person you would like to become. A description of how you intend to live, small enough that you can actually keep it.
What the word means.
The Latin regula is a trellis — a support that a growing thing is trained along. Not a cage, not a whip, not a performance target. Something that gives shape to growth that would otherwise sprawl.
Benedict wrote his Rule around 530 for men living in community, and it is startling how ordinary most of it is: when to eat, how much to sleep, what to do about a monk who breaks a tool, how to treat guests. What made it durable for fifteen centuries is not its severity but its moderation. Benedict calls it a rule for beginners, and he adjusts it repeatedly for the weak, the old, the sick, and the young.
A personal rule of life is the lay version of the same instinct: a written description of the rhythms you intend to keep, so that your life has a shape you chose rather than one that accumulated.
What it is not.
Three things it is not
It is not a schedule. A schedule says 6:15am. A rule says morning prayer before the house wakes. The first breaks the moment a child is sick; the second survives almost anything.
It is not resolutions. Resolutions are about self-improvement and they are measured by whether you succeed. A rule is about the shape of a life offered to God, and its failures are expected and built in. Benedict devotes whole chapters to what happens when the rule is broken, because he assumed it would be.
It is not aspirational. This is the one that kills most rules. If you write the rule for the person you wish you were — the one who rises at five and reads the Fathers for an hour — you will fail inside two weeks and conclude something about yourself that isn't true. Write it for the person you are on a mediocre Tuesday.
The three Benedictine vows.
Translated for a house
with children in it.
What the tradition asks
Benedictines vow three things, and each has a lay translation that is worth thinking about before you write a word.
Stability
The monk stays in this house, with these brothers, until he dies. He does not go looking for a better monastery when this one becomes difficult.
For you: stay put. In this parish, this marriage, this practice, this dry season of prayer. The instinct to change methods when a practice stops producing results is the single most common way people leave contemplative practice, and stability is the direct answer to it.
Conversatio morum
Usually rendered conversion of life — a commitment to ongoing change, to not being finished. It sits in productive tension with stability: stay, and be changed by staying.
For you: the rule is not a settlement. It assumes you are still becoming something.
Obedience
The hardest to translate, since you have no abbot. But obedience in Benedict is mostly about not being the final authority on your own life — listening to someone who can see you from outside.
For you: a spiritual director, a confessor, a spouse who is permitted to say the true thing. A rule written entirely alone and never shown to anyone tends to be both too harsh and too flattering.
Writing it.
One evening.
One page.
How to actually do it
1 · Describe the week you actually have
Before deciding anything, write down the fixed points of an ordinary week — work, school runs, the hour the house goes quiet, the day that is always chaos. Most bad rules are written without this step, against an imaginary week with more room in it.
2 · Choose one commitment in each area that needs one
The traditional areas, and a lay example of each:
- Prayer — Compline every night before bed.
- Work — the first hour without the phone.
- Rest — Sunday afternoon is not for catching up.
- Relationship — Friday evening belongs to my wife.
- Study — fifteen minutes of reading before sleep, not scrolling.
You do not need all five. Two or three genuine commitments beat five decorative ones.
3 · Make each one absurdly small
Smaller than feels serious. The test: would I keep this on the worst ordinary day of the month? Not the catastrophic day — the merely bad one. If the honest answer is no, halve it.
Ten minutes of Lectio you actually do is worth more than the forty minutes you intend. A rule you keep builds something; a rule you break teaches you that you are the kind of person who breaks rules, which is worse than having written none.
4 · Write it down. One paragraph.
Unwritten rules are intentions, and intentions drift to fit the mood. Write it in plain prose, in the first person, and keep it somewhere you will actually see it.
5 · Add what you will do when you fail
Most rules omit this and it is the most useful line in the document. Something like: when I miss, I begin again at the next hour without making it into an account. Benedict builds restoration into the Rule at every level; the assumption is not that you will keep it but that you will return to it.
An example.
What one looks like
I will pray Compline each night before bed, aloud, with whoever is still awake.
I will keep the first hour of the workday free of the phone, and begin it by naming the work.
Friday evening belongs to my wife, and does not get spent.
Sunday afternoon is not for catching up.
When I miss any of this, I begin again at the next opportunity and do not keep an account of it.
I will read this again at the start of Advent, Lent, Easter, and September, and change what needs changing.
Six lines. Nothing heroic in it. That is what a rule that survives a year looks like.
The part everyone skips.
Reviewing it
A rule that is never reviewed becomes either an accusation or a dead letter. Set four points in the year — Advent, Lent, Easter, and the start of the school year works well — and at each one read it and ask two questions.
What did I actually do? Not what did I intend. If a commitment has gone unkept for three months, that is information about the commitment, not a verdict on you.
What should change? Revise the rule to fit the life. This will feel like lowering the bar and it is not — it is the difference between a living rule and a monument to a person you were two years ago. Seasons change: a rule written before a baby is not the rule for the year after one.
The review is where a rule stops being a document and becomes a practice. It is also the closest thing a layperson has to what a novice master does, which is to look at the gap between the stated life and the actual one without contempt for either.