In the ocean of God's love
An invitation to shape an interconnected community of monks
We live in a continual state of forward motion into a future we cannot see—without either a rewind button or an undo key. As life hurtles us headlong into the unknown, we face decisions that range from the mundane to the momentous, all of which to a greater or lesser degree alter the trajectory of our lives.
To identify as a Fifth Kind of Monk can be one of our more momentous choices. It is a choice to belong to interconnected communities of monks who strive to be the love of God within the human community, throughout creation, and into the cosmos.
Because the future does not exist, our decisions are informed by what is happening at this moment and memories of past experiences and learnings. Likewise, the way we interpret the world, how we think about what we see and hear, everything our senses take in as we go through each day, can only be shaped by the present moment or stored memories. We must be as persistent and focused as a miner panning for gold as we sift through all that input to recognize what is of value. And then we must think and choose how we want it to shape us.
In a recent webinar from the Center for Christogenesis, Executive Director Robert Nicastro called thinking “a spiritual act” and noted that “we are no longer taught how to think but what to believe.” While I agree with Robert that we put less emphasis on thinking and rather tend toward unquestioning belief, one of my coworkers sardonically observed that for most of history women were never taught or encouraged to think about anything. Their role was to be silent acquiescence. And of course, in the church questions have never been encouraged.
It’s so much easier to stay entrenched in what we were once taught. But thinking and questioning and reflecting is the hard and necessary work to which we must commit if we are to “open our eyes to the light that comes from God, and our ears to the voice from the heavens” as Benedict writes in the prologue to his Rule. And once we’ve done this spiritual thinking work, what follows are new choices—and the choices of monks, as Benedict elaborates in Chapter 4, “should be different from the world’s way; the love of Christ must come before all else.”
There is an urgency in Benedict’s Rule. He lays out a road map for wholeness which, when we shake out his sixth century context, continues to offer guidance to today’s monks in our effort to be love in a universe that is always becoming. Then as now, social structures seemed to be in shambles and angst filled too many hearts and souls. Maybe we are closer to the edge of the precipice today than Benedict’s monks were, but even if not, we must update our thinking because change does happen faster today than centuries ago.
Even a cursory review of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is astounding in terms of thinking—scientific, economic, cultural—that changed the world. But much of our theology has never moved beyond the Middle Ages and the result is that we are held captive by outdated ideas that prevent us from recognizing the ongoing illumination of the Spirit. Revelation was not a one-and-done if we believe in a creating, living God. Refusal to think leads us to miss insights about spirituality and God and science and technology that could help shape our decisions in planetary-life-altering ways.
Ilia Delio, the founder of the Center for Christogenesis, explains that God is the “I am” deep within us. “God’s knowing is my knowing, it is one and the same. God can only know through me, God is more interior to me than I am to myself,” she says.
“‘Where do we live in the radicality of love?’ is the Christian question,” Ilia charges us to consider. I long to live with constant awareness that I swim in the ocean of God’s love. But how do I live consciously looking in every instance for the opportunity to love? That is the call of the Fifth Kind of Monk.
And how does a document written 1,500 years ago for monks who lived enclosed in a monastery with a vastly different worldview and understanding of the cosmos help us make that choice and think new thoughts?
I think that if Benedict the mystic were alive today, he would write about monks—cenobitic or hermits or the Fifth Kind of Monk—living in the interconnected reality of an evolving cosmos.
I see the Fifth Kind of Monk as a way of being that depends in part on the wisdom teaching of Benedict, which is both supremely practical and radically evolutionary as a container for a 21st century model of local and non-local community. It offers guidelines for living well with self, others, and God that provide sufficient flexibility for the Fifth Kind of Monk to move ever more fully toward a transformed consciousness in an ever-emerging universe.
The thing is, Benedict never pretends to be the definitive answer or the only way. At the very end of his short rule, he asks if the reader is hastening toward their heavenly home (which I read as the fullness of God). “Then,” he writes, “with Christ’s help, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners. After that, you can set out for the loftier summits of the teaching and virtues we mentioned above, and under God’s protection, you will reach them.”
The teachings that will open us to evolutionary theology and the cosmic wholeness are there waiting for us—not in the future but now, if we choose to think different. And the practical guidance and grounding of Benedict will grow us into an interconnected community of monks who are the transformative love of Christ for the world.
Nice reflection Linda, thanks for this. The mind is a fine instrument, sharp when honed, capable of cutting through illusion, of parsing the world into manageable pieces. But God is not a problem to be solved. The mystics have always known this. They press their foreheads to the earth not in defeat, but because they have learned, through the slow erosion of certainty, that the way down is the way up. Thinking is good, necessary even, but it is not the door to the divine. The door is love. And love is not a thought, it is a wound, an opening, a surrender.
You speak of monks, of choices, of an evolving cosmos… all of it true, all of it worthy of the mind’s labor. But beneath the words, there is something older, quieter. Benedict knew it. Ilia Delio speaks of it. That God is more interior to us than we are to ourselves. Not an idea to be grasped, but a presence to be lived. (I have reflected on this on my own stack (https://steveherrmann.substack.com/p/you-wont-think-your-way-to-god).
This not a new theology but an ancient recognition, that we are already in the ocean. The task is not to map its currents but to let it carry us.
The Rule of Benedict endures not because it is a perfect system, but because it points beyond itself. It is a finger to the moon, a way of arranging life so that the soul might, in unguarded moments, slip past its own defenses. Thinking refines the vessel, but the wine is poured in silence. The future does not exist, as you remind us, only this moment, this breath, this choice to love or to turn away. And in that choice, the whole cosmos tilts.
So glad I found you here! Love this reflection. Change is a a word that keeps coming to me this year in reading and reflection. Love your definition of Fifth Kind of Monk—living in the interconnected reality of an evolving cosmos.