Thursday, April 15, 2010

God on Piano

There is a small spinet piano in the far corner of Newtown Square Friends Meeting House. No one knows how long it has been there. It was slightly sour the first time I played it, but the keys all worked, and it was otherwise in good shape. When the friends found out that I played, they had the piano tuned for me. I am self taught, don't read music, but play by ear. I have a gift in this area - to be able to sit down at a piano and make music. It is a simple gift - I am not a virtuoso, not a genius, not a savant - just a person who can play a little piano. But at this ancient Quaker meeting house, I have found the performance hall that suits my gift.

I typically arrive early, sit down and put my fingers to the keyboard, and just let whatever is inside flow out. Sometimes it is hymn-like - sometimes New Agey - sometimes an improvisation over a familiar theme. A tune will come into my head, and so I play it, then repeat it with variations, or slow it down or change it and morph it into something else. That is much like I do when I sit at home and play. But there are certain times at the meeting house where something else happens, when I am no longer as conscious of what I am actually playing, and what is coming out is some unique thing that I have never encountered before. It is that last category that is wondrous - when the music is simply passing through me, and I am not as much the player as part of the instrument.

While I am playing, our small congregation trickles in to the Meeting. The process of adjusting yourself to the silence of a Quaker meeting is called "settling in". I continue to play quietly as people settle in. After about ten minutes, I leave the piano, the last few notes left ringing in the silence, and take a place on an old bench and join in the settled meeting.

In the traditional unprogrammed silent Quaker meeting, there is no minister to take charge of the service, no prayer book to follow, no printed program to tell you what to do and when to do it. Quakers have no minister who leads the service. Quakers believe there is God in everyone, and so there is no one person who has been chosen to lead the rest. In the silence of the meeting, some people will feel called to share a thought, a message, a lesson, with the rest of the Meeting. This is not a prepared text, but a message that comes to you, that percolates inside you in the silence, and that perhaps quickens you to share it with the Meeting. You have been called to minister to the Meeting. The person who feels that call will stand and share their message, and then sit back down. In the silence, each person decides whether that message speaks to them.

I rarely get that call to stand and share that type of message. There is still inside of me that boyhood shyness, that wish not to stand out in the crowd, that fear of public speaking that I have moved past in the rest of my life, but that is still present at certain times. But, after attending Quaker meetings over my first year, what I realized is that in fact I do get that call. When I sit at the piano in the corner, when I warm up and get lost in the history of the old Meeting House, with all of the people who have come for worship there over almost three hundred years, when I am no longer thinking about what I am playing, but looking out the window at the sky, and the music is simply flowing out of me, through the old piano, and filling up the silence … that is the message I am being led to share. When I am no longer creating the music, but instead the music is simply flowing through me, then I am the instrument, and God is the pianist.