My column this month was inspired by Shawn Brouwer, of the Presbyterian church in Langley, B.C. He had sent in a People and Places submission and I noticed at the bottom of the email his signature stated, “Begin Anywhere.”
I asked Brouwer about the phrase. He wrote, “Begin Anywhere is a phrase I picked up from Bono or Jeffrey Sachs (he wrote The End of Poverty) or maybe Bono quoted Sachs. (Not that I hang out with rock stars and economists …) Or maybe they didn’t say it at all, but they inspired me to adopt that phrase as a tagline. To me it means do something now. In the face of so many problems, challenges and choices (global, personal, in the church, on the job) it’s easy to be paralyzed, to form study groups, to weigh options, to wait for something to happen, to deliberate and not act. And often my email correspondence is about a problem, challenge or choice. Begin Anywhere reminds me to do something — to do what I can.”
I asked him if he would riff on the phrase and turn it into this month’s Pop Christianity column. To which he replied: “I’ll leave it up to you … begin anywhere!” Thanks Shawn!
An internet search on the phrase takes it to John Cage, the avant-garde composer, who is supposed to have said, “Not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. Begin Anywhere.'”
One of Cage’s most famous pieces is called 4’33” — or four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Any musician can play this piece on any instrument; the instruction is not to play the instrument at all for the duration of the piece. This might sound silly but I was at a performance where Cage “performed” this piece and it was a profound experience. Cage began with nothing; for four and a half minutes we went deeper and deeper into that silence. It was nothing and it was everything. It wasn’t music in the expected sense, but it was a transformative experience of the immediate environment. It was spiritual, in the best sense of that now severely weakened word.
You either begin anywhere or wallow in a self-imposed paralysis — that seems to be the option. That is, paralysis is not an option since one can begin anything at any point. You feel overwhelmed by the needs of the world and your own sense of inadequacy — buck up, kiddo, who doesn’t? Jump across this magazine to the Moderator’s column and you’ll read the stories of a few children who started their own foundations in their own small ways.
Or flip through myriad back issues and read the stories of churches who turned themselves around by doing something small. By starting mid-week community dinners. By opening job centres. Or day cares. Or community gardens. By doing things — and this is very very important — that won’t necessarily fill the pews, but will bring the immediate community into the church and the church into the community.
Like Cage’s experimental composition, it is about listening to what is; listening to the immediate environment. The secret is not to fill some empty space — and we all got plenty of that on Sunday morning — but ourselves. Begin anywhere; begin by listening and follow what you hear with some small act.
And that small act will beget another small act — and soon you will find yourself suddenly excited by your faith. Not burdened by it, not guilted by it, not shamed by it. And it is that excitement, you will find quite miraculously, that will begin to fill the pews. The paralysis is not in the faith; it is in us. A paralysis of ossified culture, of smugness, of been-there-done-that-barely-made-budget-but-if-we-cut-all-the-evangelizing-programming-we-can-afford-to-keep-the-church-doors-open-for-another-year.
Don’t take it from me: Take it from Shawn. His People and Places submission was about the 11th anniversary of a festival of music in Langley, where a variety of choirs get together and raise the roof, from Beethoven to Hank Williams. (See it online this month.) You know something that magnificent had to begin somewhere. ■
