This book, the first of a major two-volume work, exposes the processes by which silence can transfigure our lives—what Maggie Ross calls ‘the work of silence’; it describes how lives steeped in silence can transfigure other lives unawares. It shows how the work of silence was once understood to be the foundation of the teaching of Jesus, and how this teaching was once an intrinsic part of Western Christianity; it describes some of the methods by which the institution suppressed the work of silence, and why religious institutions are afraid of silence. Above all, this book shows that the work of silence gives us a way of being in the world that is more than we can ask for or imagine. Rowan Williams provides a foreword.