"If I ever thought that keeping silence was easy, my congregation taught me otherwise. From time to time as a parish priest, I recommended they try spiritual practices, such as memorizing a psalm or reading the Bible daily. But one simple suggestion proved difficult or impossible for most people to follow. During Advent and Lent, I advised that they keep silence for just a few minutes each day: turn off the phone, close the door, and be silent for ten minutes. It seemed like such an easy suggestion — something people would find refreshing.

"I thought wrong. Many people found the assignment impossible. I might as well have urged them to go home and memorize the Gospel of Luke.

"The only people who could carry out my suggestion were those who were already used to keeping significant periods of silence in their lives. This was obviously a problem. I knew that silence was good for people. As a student of the Patristic era and the Middle Ages, I heard silence commended again and again by great voices. As a regular reader and interpreter of Scripture, I had heard the value of silence proclaimed in God's own word. I affirmed this through my own limited experience: I knew the healing and strengthening power of silence. How could I teach the spiritual practice of silence to those who knew nothing about it? I began exploring this problem by asking people, What's so hard about keeping quiet?

"Some people told me they were too busy to try ten minutes of silence a day. But when we discussed things a little further, we discovered that that really wasn't the problem. Their schedules-somewhat to their surprise-included plenty of free time. Others tried the practice, but they were distracted by thoughts of the urgent things they should be doing. Some said that it just felt empty, like a dead and futile silence. Others admitted that silence frightened them, or that it hurt them to keep silence. It hurt some people physically: They itched, they ached. Some it hurt psychologically. One person told me it ' just reminded her of everything that's wrong.' They found, in short, that when exterior noise was removed or diminished, interior noise took over, which was uncomfortable. An exercise intended to meditative was, for many, stressful instead.

"And so they gave up. My suggestion to keep silence as a way to simplify life, to find calm, to get relief from the stresses of a busy world, only augmented their stresses. Replacing external noise with inner noise was a poor bargain, for the inner chaos was worse than the external agitation. As so many have told me, 'It sounded like a good idea, but then I tried it.' "