One of the things I appreciate most about spending time at Mount St. Scholastica Monastery in Kansas, is the reverence people have for listening and for silence.

One day, sitting in chapel, I noticed some Latin words from the Rule of St. Benedict written across a stained glass window: tempore and silentio. Time and silence. At the time, I’d been traveling from city to city, giving presentations on a book I had written while still working as a journalist. The words of St. Benedict’s helped me realize how “talked out” I had become. I needed the rejuvenating balm of silence and solitude.

Once a month, the monastery observes a “silent Sunday.” A peacefulness seems to enter the very stones of the place. I remember eating my lunch on one of those Sundays. I looked out the window and noticed some prairie grass, just beginning to turn green. The grass, the window had been there the day before, but I was probably too busily engaged in dinner conversation to notice either of them. When I walked the grounds, it was as if the wind was speaking to me. The day became one prolonged prayer.

While on a rare journey outside of his cloister, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote, “I get the feeling that so much talking goes on that is utterly useless. The redwood forests, the sea, the sky, the waves…it is in all this you will find answers.” In other words, it is in the silence where everything connects.