Do you hear what I don’t?

The meek shall inherit nothing. — Frank Zappa

One of the lessons of aging is that almost nothing arrives when it is supposed to. The door to the Starbucks restroom never opens while you pace urgently outside. The explanation never comes. The awaited event remains perpetually deferred, and yet the deferral itself somehow becomes the event.

This is the situation in Huis clos (in English, No Exit), the 1944 play by French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre most famous for the killer line: “L’enfer, c’est les autres.”

In No Exit, three deceased characters find themselves locked together in a plain room — furnished in the style of the French “Second Empire” — for eternity. They do not know where they are, why they have been brought there or what will happen next.

Like all reasonable people confronted with an inexplicable situation, they begin by assuming that some missing piece of information will eventually be supplied. Surely someone will enter. Surely the rules will be explained. Surely the purpose of the room will become clear.

But the longer they wait, the more they are forced to confront a disturbing possibility: perhaps the waiting is not preliminary to the drama. Perhaps it is the drama.

Something similar happens in American experimental composer John Cage’s modernist piece 4’33”.

It was composed in 1952 for any instrument or combination of instruments, but let’s go with this version: A pianist enters, sits at the keyboard, and remains silent. The audience initially treats this silence as a delay. The music has not started yet. Any moment now, it will begin.

But as the seconds accumulate, the spectators are compelled to revise their understanding of the situation. The performance is already underway. Their own anticipation, confusion, irritation and restless search for meaning have become the substance of the piece. (Here’s a scrap of meaningless meaning for the mathematically inclined with time on their hands: four minutes and 33 seconds add up to 273 seconds, and -273.15 Celsius is absolute zero, a temperature impossible to reach. Nothin’, as onetime Beatles collaborator Billy Preston used to say, from nothin’ leaves nothin’.)

Both Sartre and Cage create situations in which human beings (actors in the former case, audience members in the latter) discover that they might have mistaken an expectation for a reality. The thing they are waiting for turns out not to exist in the form they imagined.

Yet this absence is strangely productive. It organizes behaviour. It generates interpretations. It gives shape to experience.

So here we go. Might want to get a grip on the nearest zucchetto or light a votive candle for this one. Or maybe extinguish one. For the thesis here is that the concept of God functions in religion in much the same way as the silence in 4’33”. As the waiting does in Huis clos.

God is often assumed to be the central content of religious life, just as music is assumed to be the content of a concert. But a closer look suggests a more complicated possibility: that God may stand in relation to religion the way 4’33” stands in relation to music — not as a thing delivered to an audience, but as a structured absence around which expectation, meaning and interpretation organize themselves.

There is another feature of 4’33” that makes it an unexpectedly useful model for thinking about religion. Contrary to what many first-time listeners assume, the piece does not divide people into those who hear something and those who hear nothing.

Everyone hears something.

The coughs, the creaking seats, the ventilation system, the distant traffic, the involuntary noises that accompany any gathering of human beings — all of this is available equally to every person in the room.

The disagreement concerns something subtler.

What counts as the music?

For one listener, the ambient sounds are merely evidence that the performance has failed to occur. The piece is a joke, a provocation, a category error. The audience paid for music and received only the ordinary noises of a room.

Boo! Get off the stage! Freebird!

For another listener, those same sounds constitute the performance. The point of the piece is precisely to reveal that there is no such thing as silence, only sounds that habit ordinarily teaches us to ignore. Nothing has changed in the room itself. What has changed is the listener’s understanding of what deserves attention.

Bravissimo, Maestro! Encore! Encore!

The two listeners occupy the same physical space. They hear the same sounds. They are not disagreeing about facts so much as about significance.

Something analogous may be true of religious belief.

Consider two people watching a child being born, standing beside a deathbed, gazing at a night sky, falling in love, surviving a catastrophe or performing an act of extraordinary moral courage. The empirical content of the experience is identical. Both individuals witness the same events.

Yet one experiences these moments as disclosures of a deeper order, indications that reality possesses meaning beyond what can be measured or explained. The other experiences them as remarkable but ultimately natural phenomena. The difference lies not in perception but in interpretation.

This is why debates about God so often seem incapable of resolution. They are frequently conducted as though one side has observed a celestial object that the other has somehow missed.

But religious experience is rarely described that way by the people who have it. More often, it involves a transformed way of understanding experiences that are already available to everyone.

The believer and the atheist may therefore resemble two audience members sitting side by side during 4’33”. They hear the same cough. The same rustle. The same shuffling shoes. The same silence. Their disagreement concerns whether these sounds amount to anything more than themselves.

One hears a room.

The other hears a composition.

One senses the transcendent made immanent, the eternal made historical, the Logos made flesh.

One senses a farce, a parody, a travesty.

One Kierkegaardian urgency.

One God is a concept by which we measure our Dane frivolity.

Neither can easily prove his case to the other because the dispute concerns the framework through which experience acquires meaning. The facts are public. The significance is not.

In the King James Version of the Bible, Jeremiah 5:21 proclaims: “Hear now this, O foolish people and without understanding, who have eyes and see not, who have ears and hear not.” But which side misunderstands what they’re seeing and hearing? Neither? Both?

To me, the concept of God functions in religion much as Cage’s title functions in 4’33”. It does not add new sounds to the room. Instead, it proposes a way of hearing the sounds that are already there.

Now consider religion more broadly.

Not religion as a sociological institution, nor religion as a body of doctrines, but religion as a particular mode of consciousness organized around the concept of God.

For thousands of years, human beings have entered synagogues, churches, temples, mosques, gurdwaras and other sacred spaces carrying expectations analogous to those carried by Cage’s audience.

There will be revelation. There will be transcendence. There will be an answer to suffering. There will be some sign that the universe is not merely an indifferent arrangement of matter but an intelligible order oriented toward meaning.

At the still point at the centre of this turning expectation sits God on his throne. All's right with the world.

Or perhaps more precisely, what sits there is a conceptual silence shaped exactly like God.

This is where the comparison to 4’33” becomes interesting. Most theological debates assume that God functions in religion the way a melody functions in music: as the central content around which everything else is organized. God is supposed to be the thing being heard.

But what if God functions more like Cage’s silence?

What if the concept of God is not the content of religion but the formal condition that allows religious experience to occur?

After all, a religious life consists largely of waiting.

One prays and waits.

One suffers and waits.

For all we know, one dies and waits.

Beckett: “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.”

One searches for signs, answers, revelations, assurances, and waits.

Beckett: “Let’s go.” “We can’t.” “Why not?” “We’re waiting for Godot.”

The remarkable thing is not that people claim occasionally to encounter God. The remarkable thing is how much of religious history consists of God’s apparent absence.

The Hebrew scriptures contain repeated complaints about divine silence. The Christian tradition centres on a Messiah whose most famous moment of despair involves asking why God has abandoned him.

Mystics describe God as darkness, hiddenness, negation, emptiness. Entire theological traditions are devoted to explaining why the transcendent source of reality remains so difficult to perceive.

The audience keeps listening.

The pianist remains silent.

Waits: “The piano has been drinking (not me).”

And at some point, for even the most dim-witted amongst our midst, a suspicion arises that the silence itself may be the point.

This does not mean religion is fraudulent any more than 4’33” is fraudulent. The charge of fraud misunderstands the mechanism involved. Cage’s composition is not pretending to contain sounds. It redirects attention toward the sounds already present.

Likewise, religion may not primarily provide God as an object among other objects. Instead, it redirects attention toward dimensions of existence that become noticeable only when arranged around the possibility of God.

Meaning.

Mortality.

Wonder.

Moral obligation.

The terrifying fact of human consciousness.

The equally terrifying fact that human consciousness eventually ends.

In this reading, God resembles the unfathomable centre around which religious attention organizes itself. Not an answer but a question of such magnitude that entire civilizations orient themselves toward it.

Which brings us back to Sartre’s No Exit.

The characters in the room do not know why they are there. They do not know how to leave. Most importantly, they are trapped with one another’s interpretations.

The famous line “Hell is other people” is often misunderstood. The problem is not merely that other people are annoying. The problem is that human beings become trapped inside systems of meaning they cannot fully control.

The occupants of Sartre's room keep waiting for an explanation.

The explanation never arrives.

Their waiting itself becomes the drama.

The spectators at 4’33” (like the few readers of this inordinately long essay) are similarly trapped. They keep expecting the music/meaning to begin. The expectation becomes increasingly uncomfortable because each passing second forces them to confront the possibility that they have misunderstood the situation from the outset.

Religious humanity occupies a strangely analogous position.

We are born into a universe whose purpose remains uncertain.

We construct elaborate interpretive frameworks.

We anticipate revelation.

We ask questions whose answers never seem fully forthcoming.

Meanwhile history unfolds, generations pass, stars explode, children are born, people suffer, people love one another and the room fills with noise.

The religious believer hears God in this noise.

The atheist hears only the noise.

The agnostic is unsure whether there is a difference.

All three remain seated in the same room.

What makes the concept of God comparable to 4’33” is not that God is absent. It is that God’s significance may derive precisely from occupying the place where presence and absence become impossible to distinguish cleanly.

A melody can be recorded and replayed.

A silence functions differently.

Its content is determined by the listener.

Likewise, every believer encounters a somewhat different God. The concept remains stable enough to organize communal life while remaining indeterminate enough to absorb vast differences of experience. It is simultaneously empty and inexhaustible.

This is perhaps why arguments about God’s existence so rarely settle anything. Both sides often assume they are discussing an object. One side claims the object exists; the other claims it does not.

But if God functions more like Cage’s silence than like a physical object, the dispute changes character. The question becomes less “Is there something there?” and more “What becomes audible when we attend to that apparent emptiness?”

The answer may be nothing.

The answer may be everything.

The answer may consist of the strange noises human beings make while waiting together in a room they do not entirely understand.

Prayers, hymns, doctrines, doubts, revelations, heresies, philosophies, arguments, rituals, acts of kindness, acts of cruelty, desperate hopes and final questions. The covert unwrapping of candies.

The pianist never strikes a key.

The performance still occurs.

If at all, God never appears in quite the way we expect.

Religion continues anyway.

And perhaps the deepest possibility suggested by Cage and Sartre and the religious impulse alike is that the thing we thought we were waiting for was never the event itself, but the transformation of attention produced by waiting.

Eh bien, continuons.

Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy: “Do you hear what I don’t?”