Silence purifies. Those who are dedicated to silence must persevere in our over-busy world zones of purified air. We must struggle against the asphyxiation, which threatens the cities of our consumer society. We live in a world mentally polluted by verbal intoxication. If dedication to silence did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
We often consider prayer a deliberate act, something that we choose to do, or not. In the 18th century, William Law knew better:
"As the heart willeth and worketh, such, and no other, is its prayer.... For this is the necessity of our nature: pray we must, as sure as our heart is alive; therefore, when the state of our heart is not a spirit of prayer to God, we pray without ceasing to some, or other, part of the creation."
Perhaps as we learn what "part of creation" we have been praying to without knowing it, we can enlarge and re-focus our prayer, until we find that we are not so much praying as being prayed through, and all our own best hopes and the hopes of the world are flowing through us.