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.
Surrender is not an abandonment of ourselves in the face of difficulty, nor is surrender synonymous with submission, we yield ourselves to God freely, not under coercion. Surrender is not resignation. It is an invitation to be ourselves more fully... Surrender is not so much a giving up as it is an OPENING up. It is a dynamic living and striving in the face of the unknown. When we surrender in faith, we enter into the power of God, into the realm of all possibility. We open ourselves to new perspectives, thoughts and dimensions of life yet to be explored. We do not give ourselves in the sense of extinguishing ourselves. Instead, the little lick of light we are joins with the holy flaming that is God. We are brought more fully into ourselves and at the same time brought into that fullness which is greater than all that is.