BELLS STILL TOLL

“The Eternal Sound of Church Bells” The sound of church bells has been a staple in Western culture for centuries, serving as a reminder of the deeper, spiritual aspects of life. From marking the passing of time to inviting us to connect with the divine, the church bells ring on, ever ancient and ever new.

This past year I have had an enormous privilege and a blessing to live next door to the cathedral of my diocese. This majestic white baroque church is well-known tourist attraction that we now call our parish.

Every evening, quarter to six the sound of cathedral bells ripples across the town, echoed by church bells on the other hill. On Sundays, before every mass, that is, 8, 10, 12, 3 and 6 o’clock, the church bells ringing fills the air for around ten minutes. I wake to the sound of bells, I go to mass hearing them, I close the day and greet the evening calm with it. But why do we still have church bells in 2023?

The western history is soaked in sound of church bells. All the way from Saint Benedict, to Dante, to Chesterton and Saint Therese of Lisieux, the ringing of bells ushers in and closes earthly lives of both most renowned and the most ordinary people. It’s very old and very specific sound, not to be confused with traffic noise, construction or siren sounds, the ringing that pierces physical reality right through, reaching for that part in us that seeks the metaphysical. We as the people of God, no matter how close or far from Him, have heard this sound since dawn of our civilization, in our youngest days, have listened to the lullaby, sung by Our Mother Church. Thousand years in, with us maybe older now, we have this sound deeply ingrained in us and actively summoning sentiments about higher things, despite our amnesia of our early childhood and regal gowns that our Mother once worn in her glory days. It goes beyond time and it keeps going through history like sensory red thread. Ever ancient and ever new, like Saint Augustine would put it.

Church bells keep daily time too. We live in a world where sense of time is often lost in high speed blurring the lines between days, weeks, years. In our town church bells go off every weekly day before six in the afternoon. Another day, another bell ring. Never stopping, never too late or too early, like the law of God that stands before creation of the world. Even more so during the Lord’s day. Early morning calls for celebration of the Mass, the bell sound enters in through bedroom windows, proclaiming day of rest and celebration. Like for construction workers in the old days – the bell would call for lunch bread. Our Sunday bells call for a break that allows us to look at life, the world, and the people and again, after six days of labouring, together with the Creator rejoice in seeing that ,,it is good”.

The church bells are about Incarnation. They call for closer union between body and soul. The sound that reaches my ears is the sound that calls my soul. It’s more than digits on my watch, a notification on my phone, a spiritual habit. The Church knew human body well, giving it pride of place in the liturgy, letting it participate in worship in unison with the soul: through smell of incense, genuflecting, kneeling, singing. The bells prepare your body for a different state of mind. If you’re a catholic, it’s the sound of home, the sound that calls for higher instinct, the highest of them, in fact, to worship. Even if you’re in Notre Dame de Paris, Saint Peter’s in Rome or a small countryside church your parents grew up next to, the sound of bells is a call home to see your Father.

Church bells echo from time in history when people saw the world through enchantment, not taking for granted creation, life and self, but rather, inhaling deep the mystery of existence and rejoicing in it through beauty and worship. A famous quote warns us to not ask for whom the bell tolls, and yet before it tolls for you, many many times before that, it invites you to live, ever more fully, ever meow in touch with the divine and the mystery that takes place on a hill between heaven and earth, every day at six for sure.