Our culture has lost touch with the soul and with any way to meet it. It becomes more difficult all the time simply to be quiet: mobile phones, faxes, and e-mail make us more accessible to the intrusions of information. Being reflective may soon seem a radical act. Without being reflective, without entering into moments of silence, we cannot let the soul in. The soul's voice is a still, soft one, and we must be quiet if we are to hear it.
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.