The need of rules and their use
- The need and use of rules.
We have been created for freedom. Without freedom there is no love.
Without love there is no real life.
But aren’t rules a restriction to freedom?
They may become so when we put them at the centre, when we focus on them forgetting the real target for which they have been created.
Yet the rules are important and maybe the best tool in order to achieve efficacy in our work.
Let us give an example. If I write: “life because us God receive love loves we and of his”, most probably you are not able to understand the meaning of my sentence. You may have glimpsed it since the message is short and the topic is well known to you, but imagine that I write a whole book in this way, who would read it, or even buy it?
A life run by pure freedom (meant as absence of rules) can be compared to the above sentence.
On the other hand what do you think of this sentence:
“God (I used the capital letter since we are at the beginning of the sentence) loves (the s at the end is used because it expresses a 3rd person of the present tense) us (I put it here because the object follows directly the verb) and (this is a conjunction uniting two sentences) we (we and not us because now is a subject) receive (now there is no s at the end because is plural) life (see rule above about position of the object) because of his love (this explain the reason of the previous sentence)”.
Maybe here you could understand better the meaning, but it becomes almost impossible to follow the flowing of the sentence. The underlying of each single rule is a pedantry, and prevents us from focusing on the message which may get lost. Imagine once again a book written in this way, who would read it or even buy it.
If instead I say: “God loves us and because of his love we receive life”, the sentence is now simple, clear and effective; the message reaches straight to your brain and makes itself available for the process of your mind.
While I was writing this last sentence I didn’t think about the rules, but I applied them perfectly. It is not that rules were not important, but I have internalized them and so now they come automatically making the sentence beautiful simple and effective.
This example shows us the importance of rules in life and how to use them. We need hard training to learn them and understand their vital importance and desire to apply them. This process is called internalization. It is necessary that the rules disappear from the horizon but still work effectively in the background without taking away anything to my freedom of speech.
Now let us extend our example to the whole society at large. Modern times are characterized by an uncountable number of organizations, by a well structured social system which takes care of the basic systems like providing transportation, fare distribution of food, accessibility to health system, communications, to the more complex political and economic systems. All this need to be well organized and their organization need to be protected to ensure that they would be at benefit of the whole society. But who can assure that everybody can understand and respect such complex reality? A proper set of rules and regulation can be a good guideline for people to know what to do at the proper moment. Of course, in order to do so we have to ensure two things:
1- The set of rules should be done by a competent body which has really at heart the well functioning of the system;
2- The rules should be clear enough and short enough to be understood by those who have to apply them.
What we just said applies not only to the civil society but also to the religious system which we call Church. The Church has its own set of rules which is called Canon law, and furthermore each association, being it a religious congregation or a movement or an organization, has its own internal set of rules. In the religious congregations these are usually called “Constitutions”. The purpose of constitutions is to ensure the fidelity to the Church, but also to the Charism given by God to the particular congregation through the founder. Both aspects are important, that is why the constitutions are made and maintained by the highest level in the congregation, which is by a general chapter, and need to be approved by the Holy See.
USEFUL references:
Dt. 5-6
Gal. 5:1-26
Mt. 25:14-30
Mc. 10:17-27
Const. 234, 235, 236