Our modern avoidance of silence surely does all kinds of bad things to intimacy between partners, to people’s mental health and young people’s development, but perhaps its greatest ill effect is on our spiritual development.  Because all old Christian traditions, including ours, have always maintained the key role silence plays in our spiritual development.  Its foundation is in the Old Testament, which is replete with passages extolling the spiritual virtues of silence. ‘Be still, and know that I am God’ writes the Psalmist, ‘I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth! (Ps 46:10)’ Paradoxically it seems, our silence before God seems to help him speak louder.  In Psalm 62 we read ‘For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.’ Here it seems that silence is key to discernment, it helps us know which voice is of God and which ones aren’t. And finally, we even read that silence helps us take just action, ‘The Lord will fight for you,’ we read in Exodus, ‘and you have only to be silent.’