Silence is a rich and fertile soil in which many things grow and flourish, not least an awareness of everything outside oneself and apart from oneself, as well, paradoxically, as everything within. The Bible is full of people gaining understanding and wisdom and being given important messages, when they go into silent places, to pray or simply to rest in the presence of God. Prophets and saints went into deserts and up mountains. Jesus felt the need to get away from the crowds that followed him and pressed in on him, to be alone to pray and be refreshed, gather himself together again in silence and solitude. We call it recharging our batteries. 

Our children are too rarely given that opportunity or taught that the contrast between noise and quietness, like the parallel one between being in company and being alone, is vital to the growth and maturity of the individual. Silence is a place, a quality but its value increases when it is entered into as a place of contrast. We enjoy the light so much because the darkness exists. Silence is all the richer when experienced after we have been in noisy places. Solitude is enjoyable as a contrast to company. A friend teaches in a primary school and her class raised money by having a sponsored silence. Not only did they do well financially — she told me that they enjoyed the novelty of being quiet so much they asked if they could have a "silent time" more often, so she has set aside half an hour for it every Friday afternoon. It has had a magical effect on the behaviour of some hyperactive seven year olds, and when asked to draw or write a description of what the silence means to them, what they feel or think or imagine or hear or see when they are inside their silent space, she told me that the results are the best of any she has had from them. They have focused and concentrated, and gone down into their own minds and hearts, to become aware of all kinds of subtleties and minute details of the world around them, as well as within themselves, in the stillness and quietness. 

In thinking about silence, I started to find references to people's need, indeed their yearning for it, almost everywhere I turned. My local church had as an experiment a service in the style of the French monastery at Taizé, considerable parts of which involve sitting in silence, and found it so spiritually rewarding that more are planned. The local Quaker meeting house reports a great increase in attendees. I read about the popularity of retreats at Launde Abbey, in Leicestershire, to which, the chaplain says, many go who are "desperate for silence". The monastic way of life still holds a tremendous fascination for many seekers after truth, God, meaning, the life of the spirit — and silence. TV programmes about it garner large viewing audiences, in an apparently secular age in which the agenda of aggressive atheism becomes ever more vocal. The attraction of monasticism is entirely understandable. Spend half an hour in a monastery, even as a passing visitor, and only the most prejudiced or resistant could fail to be impressed by the quality of the silence, in which deep spirituality and prayerfulness flourish and the sense of God is all but palpable. But it is not only believers who are most affected. In his great book about weeks spent as a guest in various monasteries, A Time to Keep Silence (John Murray, 2004), Patrick Leigh Fermor vividly describes the extraordinary impact it made upon him and the profound effect of the deep, perpetual silence in which monks live, move and have their being. It marked him for life and he was not and has not become a man of a faith, Christian or otherwise. He was, though, humble and accepting of the places in which he stayed, open to the experience and acutely sensitive to the absolute sincerity and joy of the monks who pass their entire lives in prayer, much of it silent. He was that rare thing, a pious and respectful unbeliever. He also stresses the significance of individual sounds in this world of deep quietness — the pat of leather sandals on stone floors, the tolling of a bell, the voices raised in chant, which are as remarkable and powerful as the lighting of the first candle in the darkness of the chapel in the middle of the night. Even reading about life in these monasteries brings a sense of quietness and peace.