“It felt like being born again. It felt like being utterly annihilated only to rise again as something new, simultaneously terrifying and beautiful. It was as if God, getting inpatient and tiring of being subtle, grabbed me by the ankles, held me upside down, and shook violently until… well, I’m still not sure, but let’s just say that a lot of spiritual and psychological loose change fell from my pockets.” Drawing on a rich past experience, Br. Nicholas Bartoli invites us to encounter silence not as barren, but instead as a luminous emptiness, pregnant with the fruit of God’s Word.