Drop down, ye heavens, from above,
O sky distill your balmy showers,
For now is risen the star of love
From the rose Mary, flower of flowers:
The clear Sun whom no cloud obscures,
Surmounting daylight undefiled,
Has come down from Heavenly towers
And unto us is born a child.
Today many people are incapable of living intensely in the present, of feeling what they experience. The old monks developed a method of living completely in the present...a method of meditation they called ruminatio...to chew over. So they took words from scripture into their mouth and kept chewing them over. They repeated them in their hearts, considered and reconsidered them, looked at the word from all sides. The word became flesh in them. It changed them. It gave them something to hold onto in their spiritual unrest and the noisy world. It enabled them to live completely for the moment.