Customer Reviews

Living Faith Day by Day

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As a spiritual director I am constantly meeting people who want to establish a rule of life. Often they may not realize that is what they desire but upon reflection they uncover a desire to establish some spiritual habits that will help them pay attention to the holy. Debra Farrington's book is a wonderful resource for this. Her historical research lays the foundation and is very helpful but what I really like is the way she helps a person reflect on their life and begin to take steps in the eight areas she suggests for engaging their own rule of life. I recommend this book for all spiritual adventurers but especially for those who are seriously seeking to grow in their spiritual lives by attending to their life as a "rule" for maturing spiritually.

In this book, Debra Farrington briefly surveys the history of monasticism, then describes monastic traditions from which one may derive spiritual benefit today. One might describe the book as a gentle corrective. It emphasises the benefits of community, the advantages of accountability, the value of simple and unambitious pursuits, the need for inner rest and peace, and the wisdom of not treating our bodies as mere instruments of the will.

Having said this, the book is unlikely to find universal rapport among Christian readers, for several reasons. Perhaps the best known summary of any rule of life is "chastity, poverty, and obedience". With regard to chastity, by her own admission she is single with two cats, yet is left "feeling spiritually alive" by making love. She clearly is not living in poverty, but on an elevated level of affluence. And as far as obedience is concerned, this, too, is negotiable. One should "pay attention to what is reasonable", and "see how you feel". Her attitude to Scripture would not seem too dissimilar, with her suggestion that many passages will not be "to our contemporary tastes". One wonders about Farrington's motivation for writing the book, and whether this might not be deeply tied up with her personality. To be specific, was the book motivated by her personal need to "create a balanced life", and to be "gentle on yourself" - in short, to withdraw from the world through rationalised self-indulgence? Does the Bible endorse "a balanced life" in the sense that Farrington appears to suggest? This is doubtful. I showed the book to the head of the Franciscan Order in Southern Africa. His opinion was that it showed a remarkable poverty of understanding of the riches of monastic mysticism.

The subtitle of the book is: "How the Sacred Rules of Monastic Traditions Can Help You Live Spiritually in the Modern World". With this in mind, Farrington would appear to have selected rules which she personally considered suitable to "the Modern World". If this is what you are looking for, then this book may well suit your taste. However, if you are looking for a truly representative outworking of monastic traditions, then this is surely not the book.

While initially the topic sounds rigid, Ms. Farrington does develop a holistic approach to living a more balanced life. The blurbs from various monastic rules are quite fascinating. This book would be very helpful in developing a personal or community rule of life.

Debra Farrington's guidance in finding a rule of life covers a great variety of topics, touching on almost any aspect of life one could think of. However, she just barely describes each one, dedicating only 2-3 pages for each subject, which seems to take away from the effect. I finished each section wanting more and felt like I didn't learn enough about them to get benefit from reading it. I knew what I needed to work on, but she didn't tell me how to work on it.

I also question Farrington's motivation for writing this book. It could just be how I interpreted it, but her tone just seemed so full of pride. I felt like she worships because it makes her feel good for being a Christian, but not because she wants to praise God. This was very distracting for me, and I had trouble not noticing that the author of this book seemed to be writing it more for bragging rights than to help people grow closer to God.

Don't be misled by the nondenominational title and the broad swath of the back-of-book blurbs ("help you discover your own spiritual path by drawing on the traditions of a wide variety of ancient and contemporary religious orders"). This book is Christian through and through, as are all the rules and orders mentioned, and in fact only a few different traditions are mentioned more than briefly once or twice. I don't even think any of the "wide variety" of orders mentioned are Greek Orthodox, much less from any of the non-Christian monastic traditions. Still, the book does offer useful advice for those of other faiths. Just be prepared to ignore the author's assumptions that all readers are Western Christians.