Rhythm of Life
It is not uncommon for a book on spiritual formation to begin with the author's testimony about how he stumbled upon the subject after suffering burnout in ministry. In this blog, we rely on two such authors who learned how to order their lives only after experiencing a spiritual crash. John Mark Comer talks about his church's move to six weekly services and the effect that had on his spiritual life.
I feel like a ghost. Half alive, half dead. More numb than anything else; flat, one dimensional. Emotionally I live with an undercurrent of a nonstop anxiety that rarely goes away, and a tinge of sadness, but mostly I just feel blaaah spiritually … empty. It’s like my soul is hollow.1
We will share more from Comer below, but I want to introduce you to another authority on spiritual formation.
Peter Scazzero writes in his wildly helpful book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, that “Every follower of Jesus at some point will confront the Wall—or, as the ancients called it, ‘the dark night of the soul.’”2 I read those words as I was coming to terms with how out of order my spiritual and professional life was. Don’t be ashamed if you’ve hit the Wall; be grateful you’ve noticed it. Many leaders keep charging forward, blaming and binding the devil for resisting them, not realizing it is God who is seeking to get their attention. “Throughout church history great men and women such as Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola, Evelyn Underhill, and John Wesley have written about the phases of this journey to help us understand the larger picture, or map, of what God is doing in our lives.”3
Scazzero writes about hitting his own Wall. After suffering a betrayal during a church split, experienced “a long-lasting depression and loss of motivation to serve Christ.”4 And it got worse. His wife announced to him:
“Pete, I’d be happier single than married to you. I am getting off this roller coaster. I love you but refuse to live this way anymore. I have waited. … I have tried talking to you. You aren’t listening. I can’t change you. That is up to you. But I am getting on with my life.” She was resolute: “Oh, yes, by the way, the church you pastor? I quit. Your leadership isn’t worth following.”5
We don’t have space to discuss his entire journey, but this crisis of life and faith allowed him to make some drastic changes.
The Daily Office
As we studied in the last blog, the first monks lived by a daily rule or rhythm of life. Scazzero calls it the Daily Office, as did many seekers in antiquity. Its roots can be traced back to Judaism.
God commanded the Israelite priests to offer sacrifices of animals in the morning and evening (Exodus 29:38-39). As time went on, the Jewish people began to follow Torah readings, Psalms, and hymns at fixed hours of the day. By the time of the Roman Empire, forum bells began the work day at 6:00 in the morning, sounded mid-morning break at 9:00, the noon meal and siesta or break at 12:00, the recommencing of trade at 3:00, and the close of business at 6:00.6
By the second century, Christians had begun praying at fixed times during the day, calling it the Daily Office.7
Personally, I prefer “rhythm of life” because Daily Office sounds like work. The average believer, who does possess a devotional life, tends to be focused on the morning alone. “I need to get filled up for the day.”8 And then we leave God at home. The idea of the Daily Office is that you have specific times during the day when you stop and focus on God. We read that Daniel prayed three times a day (Dan 6:10, ESV).
Scazzero did something radical that opened his eyes to the power of daily rule: He spent a week with Trappist monks and experienced the rhythm of life. “During my time with the monks, we met seven times a day, remembering God through reading and singing the Scriptures, especially the psalms and prayer.”9 Below is the daily prayer and worship schedule they lived by:
3:45 a.m. (middle of the night)
6:00 a.m. (predawn)
6:25 a.m. (“First” hour—in their case it was Mass)
12:15 p.m. (“Sixth” hour) None: 2:00 p.m. (“Ninth” hour)
5:40 p.m. (“Evening” hour)
7:40 p.m. (before bed)
Scazzero’s time with the monks was transforming.
We chanted so many psalms (they sing all one hundred and fifty each week), read so much Scripture, and spent so much time in silence that by day three of my first week I felt like I had been transported into another world. I cannot imagine what that would do to a person’s spiritual life if they engaged in that kind of spiritual discipline 365 days a year, year after year, decade after decade.10
While most of us do not have the time or lifestyle to live in such a way, just imagine what it would be like to spend so much of your time and energy each day, freed from the cares of this world, giving yourself fully to worship.
A Monk for a Month
This might be a good time for me to say that I am not promoting Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox expressions. I am firmly evangelical. But we would be foolish to assume there’s nothing we can learn from, say, Anglicans. Scazerro is evangelical, as is Jerry Sittser, one of the most profound teachers of the history of spiritual formation. When Sittser suffered the greatest tragedy of his life—he was driving when a drunk driver hit their car, taking the lives of his wife, young daughter, and mother—it was in a monastery that he rebuilt his spiritual life.
My visits to a monastery saved my life. During a period of difficulty in my life I found solace and recovered my equilibrium by submitting on occasion to a monastic rhythm. Sister Florence, the superior in a local monastic community, heard about my situation and decided to make the services of the monastery available to me. … My first visit felt like I was returning to a familiar place. Over the next few years I visited the monastery many times. I spent hours in one of its little hermitages on a wooded hillside. I sat in silence, wept, prayed, wrestled with God, evaluated the direction of my life. … It helped me to find a new rhythm for my life.11
He reminisces about his time in the monastery and the lessons he learned:
A month ago I visited the monastery that had become a home of healing for me some fifteen years ago. … I discovered in my recent visit that I still need that monastery, or better to say, I need the rhythm that is practiced there. … My tendency is to work at the expense of prayer. That visit to the monastery reminded me of the importance of prayer too, lest I turn my work into an idol and fail to seek the face of God. I returned home from that beloved place renewed in my desire to follow the rhythm that God himself has established for my own good.12
He did not become a monk but learned from the monastery how to order his life in the midst of deep heartache and confusion.
Sittser, in his role as a professor, takes students to a remote area every winter. They stay together for a month where there are no distractions. They forfeit their telephones and computers. They live like monks following “a modified Benedictine rule”13 or rhythm. They worship four times a day and have four hours of quiet for prayer and study. “The purpose of the course is to expose students to the history of Christian spirituality.”14
He notices that when students follow this rhythm for an entire month together, something powerful takes hold of them. “At first students are put off by the unfamiliarity and strangeness of what they learn, for the history of Christian spirituality introduces them to a whole new world.”15 Like many of us, some of them have been taught that there’s nothing to be gained by studying these more orthodox expressions.
The history of spirituality becomes their history, and the characters they meet along the way become members of their spiritual family. … But over time the students find the stories of the saints compelling, holy, and beautiful. The strangeness no longer offends them; if anything, it fascinates, captures, and moves them. This history inspires them to dare to be different.16
Can you imagine yourself in such a situation for a month?
Peter Levi, a Catholic priest of Jewish descent, said, “If one spends a week or a month [in a monastery], a different scale and pattern of time imposes itself, which at first one resists as if one were in prison. When this new time-scale is accepted, it soaks into one’s bones and penetrates one’s mind.” Sittser says, “Levi observed, monastic rhythm replaces a hectic pace with ‘a tranquil, unhurried, absolutely dominating rhythm. This specially undisturbed yet specially rhythmical sense of time is the greatest difference between monastic life and any other.’”17
Rule, not Rules—Rhythm, not Legalism
When we’re talking about a rule of life, John Mark Comer points out that it’s not rules, plural, but a rule.18 The rule is meant to serve you, not you the rule. Sabbath keeping, something that comes easy to us here in Israel because it’s built into the culture, is meant to help you, not limit you. Yeshua famously said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27, ESV).
Comer compares a daily rule to a trellis in a vineyard. The very word “rule” may go back to an ancient trellis.19 Understand that a trellis cannot produce wine, but it can assist a vine in becoming fruitful.
Think of a vineyard. For a vine to “bear much fruit,” what does it need? A trellis—a support structure to lift it off the ground and index it toward the light, give it room to breathe, and guide its growth in the desired direction. Without a trellis’s support, the vine would bear a fraction of the fruit it’s capable of, and the little it did bear would be highly vulnerable to disease, damage, and dangerous predators.20
A daily rule cannot produce spiritual life. What it can do is give you a structure for you to build your spiritual life. Think of your rhythm of life as the home you live in. Elana and I travel a lot for ministry. I have a love-hate relationship with travel. I love the fruit of ministry and the relationships we build along the way. I despise the way it takes me out of my rhythm of life. When I’m at home, I know exactly where I will wake up and how I will order my day. It’s hard to do that on an airplane, in someone’s spare bedroom, or in a hotel room. I love coming home, not because I love my home, but because I love my rhythm of life when I’m at home. Often, Elana and I will take a 6:00 PM walk on the boardwalk overlooking the Mediterranean Sea here in Ashkelon. We pray a little, we talk a little, and we walk in silence a little. Sometimes, we call our children on FaceTime, depending on where they are in the world. When I am home, I know what my morning will look like. Building a daily rhythm does not mean becoming a monk or moving to a monastery; it means building moments of worship and spiritual life into your daily existence throughout the day.
This picture is not from a winery. While I was writing in this courtyard of a Jerusalem hotel, I noticed the vine that grew up around this metal fence. It’s beautiful. But imagine if there was no fence. The vine would be all over the ground, people would be walking on it, and nobody would be commenting on its beauty.
You have control over your habits and vices. “Picking up your phone first thing upon waking and checking social media isn’t just a bad habit—it’s a choice to let yourself become formed into a certain kind of person.”21 Don’t let that become your rhythm of life. I’m a bit of a news junkie. For a while, before I would focus on kingdom issues, I would check the news … and sports. Part of my new daily rule is that I check in with Heaven before I check in with Earth. I’m not perfect. At this writing, Israel is at war, so I tend to take a quick peek to see if there’s any urgent news that took place while I was sleeping. But it’s quick. I have always done devotions in the morning, but when I committed to not letting anything distract me in those early moments, I experienced an upgrade in revelation and intimacy.
Having your mind renewed and being transformed into the image of God means living a certain lifestyle. Spending hours thumbing through YouTube shorts or Instagram reels will not build spiritual life. But if I’m honest, neither will not doing it. If you remember, in the first blog in this series, my psychologist told me to quit half of my jobs. I found that I was still depressed because I did not fill that time with more profitable things. Just imagine the trellis with no vine? It’s useless.
Every day gives us opportunities to say yes or no. For the monk, he has committed himself to say yes beginning in the middle of the night. Living by a daily rule in the real world is not easy, but it’s possible. You have to learn to be jealous of your time. Steve Jobs once said, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”22 Here’s the good news: as you build a daily rule for yourself, you’ll find that you have more time than you ever imagined. You’ll be surprised at how much time you actually have for God when you use your time wisely.
My Short Visit to a Monastery
When I first began studying monasteries, I realized I’d never visited one. Elana told me there was a monastery near where she grew up in Beit Shemesh in Central Israel. A few days later, during morning prayer, I felt impressed that now was the time to visit a monastery. When I finished, I went to tell Elana, but before I could say anything, she said to me, “Let’s go visit the monastery at Beit Jamal today.” There’s evidence that both Stephen and Nicodemus were buried there. We jumped in the car and headed east.
We discovered there are two orders on the premises. In the 1800s, a monastery was built, and later, in 1987, the monks gave land for a convent to be established within the monastery's walls. If you’re interested in the daily rhythm of the nuns, you can read here. The photo below depicts this rhythm or daily rule.
While there, we met Sister Ore (light in Hebrew) Marie, who came from the Philippines but has been in Israel for almost two decades. I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with a nun before. Many evangelicals are taught that they are just ‘religious’ people but not truly connecting to God. If you meet Ore Marie, you will have difficulty maintaining such a position. She shines with a light I have rarely seen in a human.
Please do not post our dear sister’s photo anywhere.
We often think that monastic life is too insular to reach the lost. She told us how thousands of Israelis come on the weekends to visit the lush grounds around the monastery and to buy their homemade wine, olive oil, and handmade pottery. Monasteries “deployed missionaries to win barbarian groups to Christianity, thus helping to evangelize Western Europe during its darkest years.”23 The aforementioned Antony is one of the most famous monks of all, and he won untold thousands to Messiah.
Let me reiterate: I’m not moving to a monastery. I’m not becoming a monk. I want to be just as God wants me to be, but I want to be open to learning from other believers around me, even from streams that are quite foreign to me. And let’s be honest, you cannot separate a rhythm of life from the Hebrew Bible, where God consecrates a weekly sabbath that he himself observes. He gives the children of Israel a calendar to live by (see Lev 23). In other words, living by a daily rule should be very comfortable for Jewish people who come to faith in Yeshua.
1.Comer, Hurry, 2.
2.Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, 97.
3.Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, 98.
4.Ibid., 101.
5.Ibid., 19.
6.Winfield Bevins, “Discovering The Daily Office,” Anglican Compass, accessed September 22, 2024, https://anglicancompass.com/discovering-the-daily-office.
7.Bevins, “Discovering The Daily Office.”
8.Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, 143.
9.Ibid., 144.
10.Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, 144.
11.Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 98
12.Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 117.
13.Ibid., 21.
14.Ibid.
15.Ibid.
16.Ibid.
17.Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 98.
18.Comer, Practicing the Way, 177.
19.Ibid.
20.Ibid., 177-178.
21.Comer, Practicing the Way, 182.
22.Marcel Schwantes, “Steve Jobs’s Advice on the Only 4 Times You Should Say No Is Brilliant,” Inc., January 31, 2018, www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/first-90-days-steve-jobs-advice-on-the-only-4-times-you-should-say-no.html.
23.Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 97.
Greetings Ron
I am hearing just this, from so many different sources lately
When He wants to make a point,
He really drives it home
I bought J-M Comer's book, months ago,
it still lies unread
Not that it's necessary for spiritual life ,
but, a trellis, you know 😏
Bless you Ron and your family and your work and keeping the balance
Jack Lynch
Dublin, Ireland