There is no protection against adversity. There are no guarantees. What you have is yourself, made in the image of something very great, the Greatest thing. You have yourself, and the particular circumstances of your life. What you create is your measure of love. What you create is up to you. We choose what we will risk. But only the freedom that drives the risk matters.
On the surface, silence was simple: we didn't speak unless it was necessary. But what was the point of silence? The point was, we learned, not mere silence, not silence to preserve some sort of order, but something much greater. In silence the idea was to recollect ourselves, to place ourselves more squarely in the presence of God than we would if people were talking to us all the time. We could pray, we could meditate, we could contemplate.
