I write from Scotland, where I will give an 8-day retreat to the Missionaries of Charity of the UK and Ireland this week. Please keep these sisters in your prayers (and toss a few prayers up also for their poor retreat master!). Since the sisters were kind enough to pay my airfare to Edinburgh, I thought it wise to make my annual retreat here the week before I give them theirs. Famous among European monasteries is the abbey I have come to, four hours north of Edinburgh by train. It is Pluscarden Abbey, founded in 1230 by French monks, but having been closed down during the Reformation, it lay idle for three centuries. In 1948 it was reestablished, and now with 22 monks it is the oldest functioning monastery in the British Isles. One comes to a monastery above all to find silence. I am finding both the exterior silence of its quiet stone walls nestled deep in the countryside, and the interior silence of reading and chanting the psalms with the brothers eight times a day. We get to bed by 9:30, and rise at 4:30 for the night office called “Nocturnes” or “Vigils.” For an hour and a half, we chant the psalms and listen to Scripture readings. It requires a bit of discipline, but after the first half hour, I find myself swimming in a deep sea of scriptural prayer that opens my heart to a profound silence, a silence of deep joy. I’m reading a new Mother Teresa book, entitled Where There is Love, There is God. Mother Teresa writes about silence: “If we talk always we cannot pray. Jesus is not present within me. When a person really keeps silence, she is a holy sister.” Certainly we do talk too much. We live in a world of empty talk, from the nightly news to the billions of websites at our disposal to the millions of texts and emails we will send in our lifetime. But Mother Teresa makes the point that, if we fill our minds and hearts with words, with images, with sounds, then there is no room for Jesus. “An empty heart God fills,” she says. “Even God Almighty will not fill a heart that is full. Try to be alone. Try to keep that really deep silence to get rid of bitterness and hatred.” To find real joy, to find Jesus in our hearts, we need to keep silence.