A life marked by silence is not just for monastics or religious. We all need to make space for silence. The benefits of silence are necessary for both our bodies and our souls. “Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest a while." (Mark 6:31).

The young curé of Georges Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest (1937) ruminates about monks (Carthusian and Trappist): What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!