This beautiful gift book was purchased at a used book store many years ago and remained unread until June when I was in need of readings that were short. The timing was so perfect that I place this experience in what is called "when the fullness of time came." This section is from the author's foreword explaining these meditations:
While our society may not seem terribly interested these days in monastic life, it is clearly hungry for a kind of spirituality that is neither divorced from ordinary life nor escapist in tone. We may not need new leaders and new philosophies as much as the recollection of old images from the past. Monasticism may appear to be dying, but that fading of a way of life offers us an unusual opportunity to regard it with increased imagination, drawing its lessons and attractions into our own lives, no matter what external shape our work and home life may take. The ghosts of the monks still speak. We have only to listen to them with subtle attentiveness.
This is one of the meditations that spoke to me and gave a new word .... Melisma.
Sometimes in their chanting monks will land upon a note and sing it in florid fashion, one syllable of text for fifty notes of chant. Melisma, they call it. Living a melismatic life in imitation of plainchant, we may stop on an experience, a place, a person, or a memory and rhapsodize in imagination. Some like to meditate or contemplate melismatically, while others prefer to draw, build, paint, or dance whatever their eye has fallen upon. Living one point after another is one form of experience, and it can be emphatically productive. But stopping for melisma gives the soul it reason for being.
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