The whole world under one beam of the sun

Experience and expression

One advantage of age is the accumulation of life experience. It makes for a great stroll down memory lane—until I fall into a black hole of nothingness where I can’t pull up what I know is right there…somewhere.

The idea of the Fifth Kind of Monk came out of such nothingness. I don’t know where it came from, nor can I take credit for its emergence. Some unknown experience found expression in the idea, but I am not the originator nor the only one who will get it from here to there.

If my words resonate with you, then I’d say you’ve experienced similar black holes of nothingness and are looking, like me, for an expression of whatever it is that we’ve experienced. We join a long line of human seekers who have waded into the morass of life experience, of longing for something beyond ourselves, of knowing it is there, and struggling to find expression for it in our everyday lives.

We are part of Benedict’s ongoing lineage

In the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, Gregory writes that Benedict saw, “the whole world, gathered as it were together under one beam of the sun.” While the cosmological consciousness of Benedict’s contemporaries did not include 21st century scientific concepts like black holes, the whole of the cosmos has always been and mystics, thinkers, and visionaries across time have given us glimpses into the whole.

Benedict saw the potential for the Fifth Kind of Monk—and a whole lot more—in that single ray of sunlight. Experience and expression as aspects of human consciousness are infinite as long as human life exists and the sun shines. We cannot exhaust our quest for meaning, our search for God, and we cannot not be part of the whole world Benedict saw gathered under one beam of the sun.

What might that mean for those of us who are not mystics? Although I do believe the potential for mystical insight resides in each of us in those brief moments when we get ego out of the way.

Alas, for me and my generally ego-bound self, it’s ordinary sunlight that shines on each non-mystical new day. The “whole world” overwhelms me both in terms of its awesome beauty and the unimaginable suffering that it holds. I think seeing it all in a single sunbeam would crush me.

Everyday experience and expression

Interpretation of tradition is limited by those who do the interpreting. History is limited by those who write the history. Until the current era, those who shaped our world via history and interpretation did not include major portions of humanity.

The Fifth Kind of Monk, emerging in a new era, is called to evolutionary thinking, to dismantling theologies and philosophies and religious practices that hamper growing cosmological consciousness and stifle Benedict’s wisdom. Thinking and understanding never reach an end and no human thought or creation is infallible. The cosmological quest drives the Fifth Kind of Monk to go both deeper into tradition and real-life experience as well as into the depths of their own soul. As a monk’s vision is expanded in new ways of seeing the world, their expressions—religious as well as secular—must necessarily change.

Benedict’s Rule is a practical guide for the lived expression of his sixth-century experience of God, of cosmology, of human relationship. But it is also a wisdom document that transcends time because it deals with the core of human experience which is why monks today can model parts of their lived expression on that same Rule.

The Fifth Kind of Monk, however, in reflecting on the totality of their current world experience, recognizes that their expressions must also be different than Benedict’s. The challenge for them is to see from a cosmological and spiritual perspective and then model their lived expressions accordingly even when they are not the world’s ways—because Benedict said that the ways of the monk are not the world’s ways. But they do flow from the single beam of sun that encompasses the entire world. We are made of that beam even when it remains hidden in the nothingness between here and there.

Suggested reading:
A February 2025 post titled, “5th Century Byzantine Monk Buried in Chains in Jerusalem Was a Woman” concludes with this sentence that illustrates the vast lacunae in recorded history: “Either way, this highly unusual find has already forced the alteration of preconceived notions about gender roles in early Christian practice.” Source: Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports by Nathan Falde.

The Not Yet God Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole by Ilia Delio
Creation and the Cross The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril by Elizabeth Johnson