American composer John Cage (1912-1992) wrote pieces of music to be played on a variety of objects, including flowerpots, scrapped hoods of old cars, and other pieces of junk. Then he began tinkering with a piano, shoving objects under the strings, including screws, bolts, spoons, clothespins, even a doll’s arm. “Just as you go along the beach and pick up pretty shells that please you,” he once said, “I go into the piano and find sounds I like.”
Cage kept finding and adding new sounds to his compositions. Water Music (1952) required a piano, a radio, whistles, water containers, and a deck of cards. He finally decided he wanted to explore silence and so, as an experiment, he entered a completely soundproof chamber at Harvard University. Instead of hearing nothing, he heard the sound of his own circulation and his nervous system. Afterward, he said, “No silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.”
That experience inspired John Cage to write his most famous piece, also in 1952, titled 4’ 33”. Anyone performing it was instructed to sit silently at a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, to draw attention to all the sounds being made by the audience members and the world around them.
Silence is just about the last thing church boards can imagine in September. Everywhere, engines are starting. Opportunities for all ages are being amplified on every platform a church can find. Calendars are crowded with offers and activities. And all this noise, we’re sure, spills into and out of your board meetings.
In response to which, thinking of John Cage’s approach, we recommend silence. Could your church board spend 4 minutes and 33 seconds in silence? What would each of you hear? What would you overhear? What would you become aware of that an agenda-driven meeting drowns out?
Early in each of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus begins his ministry in the wilderness, with forty days of silence and fasting, no audience, before the first sermon is preached. Formation here comes before the work, not as a break from it.
Part of sitting in silence with one another for almost five minutes is that you may begin to perceive those around you differently. Silence can serve to pull us out of ourselves and help us begin, as Paul wrote, to “perceive the body.” If this leads to greater appreciation of those with you in the silence… if it offers an opportunity to think about life, faith, and your common work from more than just your own perspective…if it begins, even for a moment, to nurture empathy in the room…that 4 minutes, 33 seconds will be the most precious time your board spends together all year.
Wendell Berry died last week at the age of 92. In his 2001 poem, “How to Be a Poet,” Berry urged us (and himself) to “accept what comes from silence.”
He might just as well have been writing “How to Be a Church Board Member.”
How to Be a Poet
By Wendell Berry
(to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Which of Berry’s instructions might matter most to being a poet?
Which of Berry’s instructions would not matter in being a church board member?
Why does Berry tell us to “accept what comes from silence?”
How could it change your church board’s ministry this year if you spend 4 minutes and 33 seconds in silence at your next meeting … and then accept what comes from silence?
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