Sometimes in their chanting monks will land upon a note and sing it in a fluid fashion, one syllable of text for 50 notes of chant, malisma, they call it. Living a melismatic life in imitation of plain chant we may stop on an experience, a place, hey person, or a memory and rhapsodize in imagination. Some like to meditate or contemplate malismatically, but 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 that can be emphatically productive. But stopping for malisma gives this soul its reason for being.

P

Thomas Moore’s Meditations dealt with a monk’s daily life. Moore was a monk before leaving the Servite Order founded in Italy in 1233. His book is a reflection of his experiences that he felt would be beneficial to Christians. Being a former Roman Catholic, who is married with a family, Moore’s meditations didn’t deal with his later life as an academic and father.
The author concentrated on the rules that governed his life as religious in the monastery. Being in a cloistered community he had a spiritual director, took the vow of poverty, and celibacy. There was time to read in the library, for having meals with fellow monks, a call for prayer in the chapel every morning with matins and vespers at night before bed time. Moore had an interest in music so included were meditations on music and chanting. He described his experience in the monastery as joyful, although he missed his family, and was withdrawn from the world. But he said there was a tendency towards being authoritarian by the prior. These meditations were however from his youthful experience while a monk. Readers looking for devotions about a monastic life would find this collection edifying. ( )