Rule of Life

Every member of the Company of Jesus, beginning in their Postulancy, is expected to have an established Rule of Life. The personal Rule, which our Formation Director and anam cara help us to establish, guides us in the rhythms of our life, blending the Practices and Disciplines of the Company of Jesus and our own particular expressions of monasticism in a dispersed society.

As members of the society, we observe a common set of Practices and Disciplines that bind us together. We all live in our own social and cultural circumstances. Since we do not all live in a monastery, we do not follow the same rigorous schedule of prayer, work, worship, rest, and recreation that those in monastic life often follow. These Practices and Disciplines allow us to identify daily as monastics and to spiritually fellowship with brothers and sisters in the Company of Jesus from whom we are physically separated.

In setting forth these Practices and Disciplines, it is our desire to discern the calling of the Lord to holiness and truth, as St. Columbanus describes in his Rule:

“How necessary discernment is to the monk is shown by the errors of many and the ruin of not a few who, running their course without wisdom, and persisting in it without this guiding knowledge, failed to bring it to a praiseworthy end. For, just as those who journey away from the path must necessarily go astray, so also will those who live without wisdom of necessity fall into excess, which is opposed to virtue, for virtue is the mean between two extremes. On the right and the left of the path of discernment the enemy places diverse stumbling-blocks and snares. We must therefore pray to God to grant us the light of true discretion to lighten the pathway of our life, surrounded as it is on all sides by the dense darkness of the world.” (Rule of Columbanus, 7)