Conversation is a great art. It enriches our personality, enlarges our mental horizons and matures our opinions. Conversation is the fruit of silence and reflection. Talk is the firstborn child of noise. That explains why those who know how and when to be silent have so much to say when they speak, and why strangers to silence have so little. Perhaps we are talking our energy and even our essence away when three-quarters of the time we have all of nothing to say.

Many persons are startled and then amused that silent, contemplative nuns should have a lively interest in conversation at all. What would cloistered nuns possibly have to talk about? They live with the same small group of women continuously. The scenery never changes. The single hour of recreation must be a grim affair of exchanging reminders that we must all one day die, and possibly commenting brightly on the crack in the enclosure wall.

Once a puzzled priest inquired as to what we talk about after the first couple of years in the cloister have exhausted each nun’s private stock of amusing anecdotes brought in with her from the world. “I guess you must have to tell lies,” he concluded sadly. Yet we go on, year after year, never managing to share all the riches of a silent day with our sisters in the hour of conversation that marks each day’s close. No one has time to invent any entertaining lies! We find the truth of being alive and together not only so much stranger but also so much more wonderful than fiction.

Saint Luke is fond of telling us how our Lady “kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.” She had many things to keep and to ponder: the secrets of God and the mysteries of his love. Those secrets and mysteries were laid in the silent repository of her soul. Out of these silent ponderings came a sublime poem, Magnificat anima mea Dominum, a short sentence at a wedding banquet, and a question in the temple at Jerusalem. Precisely because our Lady had so much to tell us, she said very little.

Silence is a party to the most important things in life, whereas idle talk belongs to the trivia of life. Out of rich silence come the exchange of ideas and the words we shall remember. So it is in cloisters. Because we cannot express each new thought that enters our minds at the very moment of its entrance, but must put it aside for the one evening hour of conversation, we become expert at separating the chaff from the wheat. That explains the vitality of the recreation hour in cloisters. What each nun has to say is the product of her silence, and so it is worth the listening, even when it is only light-hearted banter. Light banter, too, can be an art!

Conversation is coming to be something of a lost art in our age. It is our business to reclaim it. Relatively few are called to live in the silence of the cloister, but each of us has a cloister in his or her own heart. If we do not learn how to dwell there happily, to take our mental rest and some of our mental nourishment there, we are untrue to ourselves. Each of us has a great deal to give to others. We discover what it is in silence and we dispense it in conversation. The one who has learned to think independently in that cloistered silence is the one whose words will be worth remembering.

There has never been a great conversationalist who was not skilled in the art of listening. And the art of listening is perfected only in silence and reflection. Our Lady was the most perfect listener who ever lived. That is why her few words are the most memorable ever uttered by a creature. We think in silence. Inspiration, like grace, is given to quiet; for its delicate voice is drowned in noise. Our Lady of Wisdom can teach us the art of listening if we ask her. She will share her gift of quiet with us if we desire it. —Redacted from an essay from “Spaces for Silence” by Mother Mary Francis, P.C.C.