John Cage was an avante garde American composer, whom some consider one of the greatest musical influences of the 20th century.  He was especially fascinated by sound, and described music as “a purposeless play which affirms life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”.

In 1951 John Cage made a visit to Harvard’s state of the art anechoic chamber. This room was specially designed to eliminate every earthly sound possible inside of it. The material covering the walls of an anechoic chamber used wedge-shaped panels to dissipate as much audio energy as possible before reflecting it away.  Even the room itself rested on shock absorbers, negating any vibration from the rest of the building or the outside.  Rooms without echo are called “dead” by audio engineers, but when John Cage entered this room and the door closed behind him the room was alive with sounds!  He spent a long time in there listening to all the noises.  Finally when he came out one of the engineers asked him if he was impressed by the absolute silence?  “No.” He said. “I heard two distinct sounds: one very low and one very high.”  The engineer told him, “As long as you are alive you’ll never stop hearing those sounds.  The low rumble you hear is your circulatory system, your blood pulsing through your body, and that high whistling noise is the sound of your nervous system.”

Cage was delighted by this revelation and the next year he wrote his most famous and most favorite work: 4′33″.  It was a four minute and 33 second performance consisting of nothing but the quiet environmental sounds in that performance space.  He intended the piece to allow the audience to reflect on the reality that no hearing person has yet been able to escape noise entirely, sound is inherently present even within us.  It is inescapable.

We gather together as Church of the Beloved because there is one more sound that we have found impossible to escape: the small persistent voice of God within all of creation, and it is just as inescapable as the blood in our veins or the hum of our nerves.  God’s is a voice you know.  Trust that voice, like sheep trust a shepherd.  Listen for the voice of our Shepherd.