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The Sabbath Life Podcast is about sharing stories from the Abbey of the Heights retreat house in Tulsa—all about finding rhythms of life that make us more human, learning the Christian contemplative tradition, and becoming friends with time.
Peter White (00:05)
Welcome to the Sabbath Life Podcast. This is a space where we share stories about the Abbey of the Heights, the Christian contemplative tradition, and rhythms of life that make us more human and friends with time. I'm Peter White. I'm one of the hosts of the Abbey of the Heights, a Christian retreat space here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And today I'm joined by my good friend J.R. Rozko. J.R., do you want to share a little bit about who you are and the ministry work that you're connected to?
JR Rozko (00:29)
Yeah, happy to. Let's see. My wife is Amy, and we've got three kiddos, and we live in Canton, Ohio, the northeast part of the state. Amy and I are both Anglican priests and are tending to a ministry here called the Canton Abbey. So we have all this Abbey-ness in common. You have a physical space, which is lovely. We do not.
But out of the overflow of the Canton Abbey, there's a variety of ministry that we sort of tend to, the main expression of that would be a church community that came into existence about five years ago, not really of our own making, but just in responding to the needs and desires of other people. Something called Common Life Church emerged. And so Amy and I also tend to this as a bit of a Fresh Expression kind of church.
Yeah. How's that?
Peter White (01:22)
Awesome. Yeah, fantastic. So glad that you're here. So, JR, you and I, we first connected, I think, at least in person, when I first joined the Anglican Diocese that we're a part of. And it wasn't long after that that you invited me via an email to something called the Order of the Common Life. I think that was about four years ago now.
Share some about what the Order of the Common Life is and what that means.
JR Rozko (01:50)
Yeah, just to set the stage for that briefly, to say, like all the way back to when I was a grad student at Fuller, which is the early aughts of the early 2000s when I was a grad student, I had never known about things like monastic communities and religious orders and mission societies. And I got exposed to these things for the very first time. And so since that time, so over 20 years now, I have just been really interested in how God brought into existence expressions of church that are not like normal local church, right? But these other expressions. And knowing the role that they played in sort of the broader life of the church, as well as within culture in particular, I was like looking at Western culture and going, I just wonder if like the Holy Spirit might again sort of revive like these kinds of expressions of the church for a particular reason.
And then so I just have maintained an interest in that for over 20 years. And then towards the end of 2020, I became aware of the Order of the Common Life that was founded by a guy named Jared Boyd, who's a Vineyard pastor. He's in Columbus, Ohio, about two hours away from me. He and I had gotten introduced in 2016 when my family moved here to Ohio. We had had a little bit of touch back and forth, and then he wrote to me in 2020, end of 2020, and just said, Hey, I want to let you know about this new religious order that we're trying to start, and invited me into an experience and Amy as well, into an experience called postulancy. And I just had a like it was profoundly meaningful to me and formational for me, and felt like an answer to prayer of like 20 years of wondering about God's plans for like me and a relationship to something like a religious order.
Peter White (03:39)
So then what happened next?
JR Rozko (03:41)
Yes. So the Order of the Common Life, explains itself as a global ecumenical religious order that's trying to introduce the core components of like monastic formation back into the life of the church for like everyday people, whether they be lay people or clergy such as you or me.
And one expression of that is an invitation; it's not the only thing that the Order of the Common Life does, but a primary thing that it does is it invites people to think about taking on its rule of life for themselves. So OCL is a dispersed religious order, meaning it doesn't have a cloister; it doesn't invite people to like live in a common place, which might be one of the things that you think of when you think of like a monastic community or religious order. But it's a bit more dispersed, like people are all over the place. So postulancy then is a first step to sort of exploring the idea of a rule of life and, in particular, OCL's rule of life and just asking the question: like, is there an invitation for me here to take on this rule of life as a basis of my own formation and belonging to this broader community? So, in terms of like what happens next, at least for me, like there's an invitation then at the end of postulancy to say like, What do you think is next? And for me, it wasn't just my own personal desire to continue on in a relationship with the order. It was actually, and this would be a longer story, but it was really tethered into my sense of calling and my vocation as an Anglican priest. And so quickly, like opened up a conversation between myself, Jared, who's the founder, and our bishop at the time, Todd Hunter, about the idea of creating an Anglican chapter of the Order of the Common Life.
Peter White (05:26)
Hm, yeah. So much of that sounds familiar to me, just in my own story and like finding like spots that rhyme, in a way. Because I grew up in a really evangelical church setting where I did all of the youth group things and absolutely loved it. And went on mission trips all the time. I felt like from that church experience I learned that loving Jesus was really important and reading the Bible was really important and doing cross-cultural mission trips was really important. And something else I feel like I picked up, nobody ever s really said this out loud- was that then you show Jesus you love him by being busy at church all the time. And so that was my life for probably about the first 20 years.
And I went to a Christian college where I just absorbed really more of that and wanted to go on the mission field then, but then life kind of crashed and burned and found myself asking all of the hard, really big emotional questions of God of like why does any of this really matter? And yet having this really good church experience that I didn't want to let go of. And and so wandered into a house church. I was at the time living in Kentucky to start seminary, and this house church used a Catholic prayer book for the rhythm of their meetings together, and that just blew my mind. I'd never seen anything like that before. And then the guy that led that community took me to the Abbey of Gethsemani, where Thomas Merton is buried and did all of his writing from Gethsemani. And that just opened up this whole new world of things that I was like, I've been in church my whole life, and nobody's told me about any of this stuff. And it was so refreshing to me and made me feel like I could hold on to this. This is this is good.
And so I remember going back to my dorm, trying to introduce the daily office to the guys in my dorm. And one of them looking at me like, So do we have to like take vows of celibacy to do this? I was like, No, no, no, we're just we're just praying the Psalms like every day. Like, what's so wrong about that? So yeah, that was part of my story that I bring to this, and what was really winsome to me when you came to me and invited me.
You used the language rule of life a minute ago. Could you say more about that? Cause that seems to be kind of a buzzword to some people right now. And so what does rule of life mean to you and to the order?
JR Rozko (07:51)
Yeah. Yeah, man, I mean, there's so many rabbit trails to go down there. Of course you're right that like it hits our ears, you know, in different ways. The way that I, when I get invited to like try to explain that to people, is I sort of say, I ask people the question, how do you feel about who you're becoming? And that's, you know, they're usually taken aback a little bit. Like that's that's a thinker, right? Like most people don't have a ready answer for that, or even maybe a category for going, maybe I ought to be thinking a little bit more intentionally about, do I even know who I'm becoming? And so, you know, a rule of life is a way to sort of like be a bit more intentional about an answer to that question, is to say, like, to have some sense of the kind of person that we think God is inviting us to become. And then a rule of life is basically a guide. Some people call it a trellis, like a way to say like here is a path for me along the way of trying to become a particular kind of person, not to achieve anything, but to sort of like live into the fullness of how we understand the identity that we've been given by God, in a sense of vocation and calling, and a way in which our discipleship plays out.
Peter White (09:08)
Yeah. How have you found your experience of the order up to this point like shaping your life? I mean, do you sense you're changed or different than you were when you started the journey a couple of years back?
JR Rozko (09:21)
Yeah. For sure. I totally do. I mean, like there's certainly just like categories. I mean, I there probably would be small things along the way that I would say have been like brand new thoughts for me and new learning that like I've integrated into who I am and how I understand God and things like that. But I would say by and large, there's a way in which the order has helped me to like make connections and put things like bring certain things up on the dashboard of my mind, like a little bit more brightly, and invited me to give them a little bit more time and attention. I also think now this is like speaking really subjectively and personally. I'm 47. When I encountered the Order, it was 2021. So you're talking six years ago. So like, you know, just across that threshold of 40, when I started to encounter the order of the common life, the second half of life kinds of things where it wasn't also again not brand new, but like a turning of like doing more internal work and looking inside a little bit. And I just wanna say like the structures, the categories, the spaces, the formational kinds of like training and things like that that I've encountered in OCL have given me unbelievable kinds of access to sort of like with God, like tending to my inner life.
That just hits different after 40 or thereabouts, I think, than before. It's not as though we shouldn't be doing internal work before 40, but I'm just again, speaking subjectively personally, I think that there was a way in which the coming together of those two things at the same time wound up being really impactful for me.
Peter White (10:49)
You know, I'm thinking too about this idea of rule of life, of the difference between feeling like I need to create my own rule of life by myself and receiving it from a monastic community like the Order of the Common Life. How do you experience those differences? Or what have you noticed?
JR Rozko (11:14)
Yes. Yeah, well, I'll just say, like, again, the idea of a rule of life was not brand new to me when I encountered the Order of the Common Life. It was something I was familiar with before that, but had basically zero success. Like trying to fashion my own rule of life and actually sticking to it. And that's what I hear from most people is like they actually- those who invest themselves in trying to understand the actual point of a rule of life, who then try to fashion one from themselves. It's not as though there can't be any benefit to that. There certainly can be. But by and large, the people that I've talked to are like, it's really hard to maintain a particular rule of life on my own. And I would say historically, well, it like it's never been meant to like that's not how like, because it's different than discipleship, right? So I mean like, we're all called to discipleship.
But not everyone is called to the same rule of life, which I would say is like a particular way in which you're like living out a trajectory with which you're living out your discipleship. And so the value of having other people alongside of you who are sharing in the same commitments. And I'm not one who's really prone to even think about that through the lens of accountability, but more just knowing I'm part of a community of people that's like oriented in the same direction. Like there's something we share about the kind of person we believe that God has called us to become. And then of course, as you know, within the space of the Order of the Common Life, those of us who are members as novices or vowed members are placed into formation groups or triads. And so at least on a monthly basis, if not more, you're in conversation with people who are sharing in the same rule of life as you.
Peter White (13:07)
Yeah. There's something about sharing it with others that it just hits really different for sure. So if a person were, say, listening to this and thinking, you know what, that sounds really interesting to me. I'd like to pursue that. What happens? Like, how could they do that?
JR Rozko (13:13)
Yes, yeah, so here are like two questions that I would propose that someone ask if they think maybe an investigation of OCL might be for them. So the first question is, is there something in me that longs for a deeper encounter with the love of God, within the realities of my life, interior as well as exterior, like my life as it is? And then secondly, am I intrigued, just what we've been talking about, am I intrigued by the idea of exploring alongside others the formational possibilities of a life of shared rhythms and commitments?
So, like that question was being posed to me not long ago, and I sat down and had to really think about that and say, and that's what I came up with was to say, if you are a yes to those two questions, there's a really good chance that you would find something very meaningful and formational in stepping towards the Order of the Common Life. I mean, what that means practically, maybe I can say a little bit more about the broad range of things that the Order of the Common Life does.
But this slice of like, what we, of postulancy, that like I might want to think about exploring the Order's rule of life. I mean, a little bit upstream of this is the opportunity. We've created a course called A Contemplative Foundation. You just offered this at the Abbey, and a bunch of people went through it. I've offered this course online a number of times. It's a free curriculum that's on our website that anybody actually can go through, but that's a way to get sort of immersed in the idea of contemplative spirituality and the Order's DNA. But then after that, whether you do that or not, postulancy is an invitation to join a cohort that would last for nine months. These cohorts launch in September of every year, and then conclude in May or early June the next year. And there's like online content that's being delivered to you, short video teachings and reflection questions, and invitations to participate in some of our, to try on some of our rhythms and commitments and things like that. And then twice a month you're gathering with your cohort online to have 90 minutes worth of conversation about like what your experience is as you're encountering this content and trying on, like reflecting on these questions and trying on some of these practices. So you're just in a cohort of others. So anyways, those are the broad strokes of like what postulancy actually entails. And you are also in the midst of that, meeting with a spiritual director on a monthly basis as an additional space of formation and reflection.
Peter White (16:00)
Yeah. Yeah. So there's a year long of postulancy, kind of trying on the order and this rule of life and this community of people. And then the step after that is novitiate. And then what happens, how is novitiate different from postulancy, and what kind of questions do you feel like people are asking at that stage or the internal work that's going on there?
JR Rozko (16:13)
Yes. So if you think about it as a house, like postulancy is maybe like the front porch. It's kind of like come hang out on the front porch, get to know this family that lives here, what they're all about, like how their house runs and things like that. And then at the end of postulancy, we would say for the order, like the goal, the win at the end of postulancy is that you have some amount of clarity about the next thing that you feel like God is inviting you into in terms of a deeper life with Him and in the context of your local church. Some, not all, will say, Hey, I actually think that there's probably more here for me with the order. And everyone is if they feel like that as an invitation from the Lord, then there is an opportunity for them to apply to the novitiate.
And there are three core essential parts of the novitiate experience. One is the 19th Annotation of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. And so this is like an hour a day of scripture reading and prayerful reflection that's guided by weekly spiritual direction, meeting with the spiritual director every week.
That also is usually like a nine-month-ish kind of process. It can kind of like flex a little bit, but again, that usually starts in the fall and then goes until the spring. So that's one experience that everyone is intended to have in the course of being a novice in the Order of the Common Life. There's also a novitiate study that we've created, again, about a nine-month process that goes from the fall to the spring, where this is more content-based, some reading, some videos, basically our our way of saying we want you to get to know the tradition that we are coming out of a little bit better and to like become a bit more familiar with our rule of life and the way it's expressed and the monastic tradition that we emerge out of. And then finally is like a discernment of vows process that, if you complete those two things, and those can go on as long as like people can be novices forever if they want to. There's also this what we call Ordinary Time, where if you don't feel like you have the time or inclination to sort of take on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in a given year, or you're like not really thinking about the novitiate study, then we would say you're just sort of like living in ordinary time as a novice, which means you're meeting with a spiritual director on a monthly basis and you're part of a formation triad or a formation group that's meeting monthly to talk about one aspect of OCL's rule of life and to reflect on how that commitment is doing formative work in you. And then to go back, so the discernment vows is sort of like if you get to a place where you're like, I actually think God might be leading me to a place of maybe taking vows towards full membership in the order.
Then you go through about an eight to nine month cohort-based guided process called discernment of vows, where you're getting a lot of clarity on your sense of calling and vocation and asking the question, what's my vocation? Should that vocation be held by a religious order? And then finally, like, is the Order of the Common Life the right order to hold that vocation?
And so those are like some of the big questions that are asked through the discernment vows. And then once you reach the end of that, which I have personally just reached the end of that, you'll do what I'm about to do this fall, which is to take temporary vows for somewhere from one to five years. You just sort of decide how long you think that should be, and then you take temporary vows before you ever get to a place of taking final vows.
Peter White (20:22)
Okay, so the language of vows isn't forever language. Like, what does that mean? Because I think in Western culture, like we don't do vows very well. So yeah, what does that mean in this setting?
JR Rozko (20:34)
We do not. Yeah, I mean, you are moving toward a place of wondering, ought I to take permanent vows with the order of the common life? So like that is possible, right? That someone gets to a point and just after successive periods of taking temporary vows, you're kind of continuing to ask the question, Is God inviting me to take permanent vows to this order now? Because the Order of the Common Life is ecumenical, you're not vowing to a person or a superior the way that you would be in a Catholic tradition or even in an Anglican tradition historically, the kind that you and I are a part of. There would be sort of a person, a superior, that's head of an order that you would be vowing to. The way that the Order of the Common Life understands this is that you're sort of taking a vow to the Holy Spirit in the context of the community of the Order. And the things that you're vowing to are conversatio morum, which is a fancy Latin term for like the continual conversion of life. And so you're vowing to that, to obedience to the Holy Spirit; you're taking a vow and saying, I'm always going to keep saying yes to everything that the Holy Spirit invites me to. And then to stability in our commitments, which is like, I'm just not gonna make big quick changes to my life. That like I believe that God has called me to a place of stability within the rhythms and commitments of this rule of life and within the community of the order. And there's going to be a lengthy discernment process if I were ever to sense that God was calling me out of my current vocation or station in life. So those are the things that you would be taking vows to.
Peter White (22:18)
I wonder about just the language of faithfulness as being maybe a winsome way of talking about vows, like in the ways that this could be a really subversive way of living in our world today is like we choose to stay and be faithful to this way of being in the world.
JR Rozko (22:35)
Yes. I think that's right. I am thinking more and more these days about what is entailed in the difference between understanding discipleship as mainly about the consumption of content, the things that I'm trying to get in me, not that content is bad, versus understanding discipleship through the lens of commitment. And I think that those things are really different, both needed, but really different. And I think that the push that you're talking about culturally, but I would also say within the church that like most of our local churches are not actually calling us to much of a commitment to anything. And I think personally, I think this is one of the main things I would attribute the crisis of discipleship to in the life of our church, is that like we're just not calling people to commitment to significant things. And so, this is one of the things that the Order of the Common Life, in sourcing itself from the monastic tradition, is actually trying to return to, like the bloodstream of the church is this idea of commitment.
Peter White (23:36)
Yeah. I love that idea of maybe accenting commitments more so than content. That's a really interesting dynamic, I think, or contrast. That's really good.
I think for me personally, what I've noticed in myself over the last four years as I've participated in the Order and this rule is like the centering of the love of God in my life. And even in the way that I talk, like, has become more and more a thing.
So like I remember doing the novitiate study and reading To Love as God Loves by Roberta Bondi. And I've put that now as a part of our curriculum for our School of Spiritual Direction because I think it's just such a central, just almost a philosophy of life and being with God. Just even that title alone, To Love as God Loves, I think is just a great way of orienting our lives. And something I've noticed in myself.
JR Rozko (24:34)
Yes. The nature of the formation that the Order of the Common Life has developed is pointed in this direction of saying we want to form people to be able to notice and nurture the love of God at work in them and around them. So like that's the way in which our formation is pointed to in resulting in that people would wind up functioning as what we would say as like evangelists or missionaries for the love of God. And so where people find themselves in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in their local churches, in their places of work, that they would increasingly have this self-identity, that like I am an evangelist for the love of God, in all the places that I find myself.
Peter White (25:19)
Yeah, yeah. And that's so beautiful. Yeah. So that makes me think of this other question I was ruminating on. It's like, why does the world need things like the Order of the Common Life right now? Like what's at stake and what makes this so important?
JR Rozko (25:37)
Yeah, man, such a dangerous question to like end on. I think I'd want to say there, so I think I would want to say I think it's the church that needs it first and foremost. There are just realities at play within the life of the church where, yeah, I don't I hardly know where to begin. But that in losing touch with what things like monastic communities, religious orders, mission societies. The fancy theological term for these things would be sodalic expressions of the church. Within Protestantism, the loss of those has just impacted the character and the witness of the church in really significant ways. And so, first and foremost, I think there needs to be a reclamation of this side of the church within the broader ecosystem of church life. And then out of that, I think is like the development of certain categories of people that like local churches can't produce. So this is what I mean about like why these things have to work together is that religious orders are like specialists. Like local churches are like generalists, and they ought to be. Like that's how they function. And then religious orders like have a very specific kind of thing that they're focused on doing the way in which they're trying to form people or be on mission together or things like that. And so one of the most interesting things about the development I mentioned Common Life Church is on the front end of that, we were dealing with a lot of people who had gone through some deconstruction or maybe had one foot out the door of the life of the local church. And we began to expose them to the idea of a rule of life and to shared commitments and things like that. And you would, they would not have been the category of people that you would have think would have responded. In your mind, you would have thought, like, well, this is for like super Christians, like people who have been Christians for a long time.
And so, the question about like why does the world need this is because I would say there's something like otherworldly that the church is meant to like bring into existence in the world, and people aren't finding that by and large in the life of our local churches. And so things like the Order of the Common Life, and I mean, if God is good and gracious, then there will be scores and scores and scores of other iterations of the Order of the Common Life that come into existence in the decades ahead, is because I think that they can offer the world something it's really longing for.
Peter White (28:06)
Amen to that. That's awesome. Well, JR, as you mentioned, there were dozens and dozens of rabbit trails we could keep going down and do this all day long. But thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for sharing with us and being here. I've got a handful of questions that I ask as kind of a wrap-up, and these are just kind of like fun, top-of-mind, you know, don't think too hard about these. Are you game for this? All right.
JR Rozko (28:27)
Yeah. boy. All right. Yeah, let's go.
Peter White (28:31)
Okay, so what's the last book that you read?
JR Rozko (28:34)
It's right here. I read Kingdom Apprenticeship by my friend Keas Keisler.
Peter White (28:41)
That looks like easy reading.
JR Rozko
It's not. Well, I mean some of it is, and then when he gets into Dallas, this is about Dallas Willard, who the whole reason I wound up doing a dissertation was because of Dallas and one of his lines about salvation, and so Keas is a friend and, man, I really love that book. I'm also, I think, like everyone else right now reading Theo of Golden. So this is like a very snapshot moment in time. But like it's, you know, one of the hottest books, fiction books on the market right now. And everyone's recommending it, and I'm loving it.
Peter White (29:16)
It's the thing to read now. Yeah. If your job could be anything different than what it is now, what would you want to do?
JR Rozko (29:18)
Yeah. I would love to be a person who is hired to go visit resorts in tropical places around the world and review them.
Peter White (29:34)
Awesome. I love that.
JR Rozko (29:35)
Is there a market for that? Because if there is, I may leave and do it.
Peter White (29:41)
You could be an entrepreneur and start that. Why not? Yeah. So related to that, what's a place to travel that you've never been before?
JR Rozko (29:44)
Okay. Yeah, well, I love that idea. I mean, it's a tie between, is it a tie? Australia and Hawaii are two lands that I have long wished to visit that I have not been to either one.
Peter White (30:01)
Nice. What would you say is a comfort food movie for you? Like a movie you could watch over and over again and never get tired of?
JR Rozko (30:09)
Hmm. What's this podcast rated? Just kidding. man. You know, The Greatest Showman. I'm a big fan of The Greatest Showman. I love watching that movie.
Peter White (30:17)
Are you?
Awesome. Do you have a favorite place to eat a meal?
JR Rozko (30:22)
Like restaurant or like land?
Peter White (30:26)
You are welcome to interpret the question as you may.
JR Rozko (30:29)
Yes. In Akron, there's a little, like, hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant called Luigi's that has a lot of nostalgia for me, and their food is fantastic. And there are often lines out the door to get in, but it's a personal favorite, Luigi's in Akron.
Peter White (30:46)
Awesome. I'll have to come visit. If you and I were going to karaoke, what would be your song?
JR Rozko (30:50)
Something quick. Maybe what would be fun to sing? My dad was a big fan of the Beach Boys, and so he's passed away sadly, and so in his honor I might select a Beach Boys ballad.
Peter White (31:02)
That'd be fantastic. Last one, what makes you laugh the hardest?
JR Rozko (31:14)
Man, just because it's top of mind. Amy and I recently watched a stand-up special by a guy named Derrick Stroup on Netflix. And he would, like, just this last week when we were on vacation, and he has this like extended set where he's talking about experiences of his life in school in the 90s. And it just, like Amy would tell you, we've been married; actually this weekend will be 17 years, she's never heard me laugh so hard, as she heard me like crying. She had to stop the play of this Netflix special because I was laughing so hard. But man, it just hit in a particular kind of way, thinking about how relevant it was to my own experience of school in the 90s.
Peter White (31:56)
Oh man, I'll have to check that out. That sounds great. Well, JR, again, thanks so much. If people wanted to connect with you or with the order particularly, where could they do that and learn more?
JR Rozko (32:11)
Yeah. I'm not super prolific online. I'm on Facebook, J.R. Rozko, and you can visit thecantonabbey.org or commonlife.church to kind of see what we're up to. And then the Order's website is theorderofthecommonlife.org is where you can learn more about that.
Peter White (32:31)
Great, again, thanks for taking the time to do this today. And thank you, listeners, for being with us too. You can learn more about the ministry of the Sabbath Life on our website, thesabbathlife.com, and you can find information there about booking a personal retreat here or for a group at the Abbey of the Heights.
And if you'd like to make a financial gift to support the ministry of the Sabbath Life, you can also do that on our website at thesabbathlife.com/give. We exist because of the generosity of people just like you. And then last thing, be sure that you're subscribing to the podcast so that you're able to catch the next stories that we share. If you like what you're hearing, please also leave us a review so that others can more easily discover us. Help us spread the word about the Abbey of the Heights and a life of rest and the love of God.
So until next time, may you know in the deepest parts of your soul that you are God's beloved.