The person who loves never abandons contemplation. On the contrary, s/he alone thirsts for it in the right spirit ... God gives Love to those in prayer, and the more s/he loves others, the better s/he can understand. Being filled with God's love, one is capable of a new love for one another -- a joyful and self-forgetting love. Love brings contemplation itself into the mystery of change. It is no longer a neutral point from which the transformations of love are beheld; it is carried away in the flood of the love which is ever the same and ever new, forever changing.
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.