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.
In our time the impulses of evil have become so powerful throughout earthly evolution that inner powers reaching far beyond what is ordinarily called good or moral will have to be found if humankind is to be able to cope with them. What is so particularly -- and immediately -- necessary in this connection is the mastering of that spiritual process which has been defined as "moral breathing", the beginning of which is forgiveness.
We can forgive! Everyone can forgive what lies within them to forgive. We can forget what ought to be forgotten instead of rummaging about amongst old injustices. We could draw a line beneath all the old that wear us down and which we are not in a position to get to the bottom of. We can hold fast to the idea that what is fruitful is alone true. We must be able to work together again, in harmony and without excluding the people we do not like ... out of love for humankind, for the whole of erring humanity.
