To Hear the Bells Ringing
“Behold, now is a very acceptable time.” — 2 Corinthians 6:2
Last summer, we traveled to southeastern France to visit my sister-in-law who lives in an entirely cloistered Benedictine monastery there. How we took ourselves, my mother-in-law, our almost 2-year-old, and the 28-week-old child in my womb across the ocean — by car, by plane, by plane again, by train, and then by car — is still completely incomprehensible to me, even almost a year later. But we did, and the journey was well worth the smiling face we saw behind the grille for the first time in nearly 4 years.
We came to visit, to rest, to introduce our daughter to her aunt. We traveled very little, and spent most of the day playing in the rocks that cover the ground of the arid environment. We spent lots of time in the book shop, ate lots of good bread, and made many, many trips up and down the short, hilly road that leads from the guest house to the public entrance of the church and cloister.
On our first morning there, we set no alarms. I was awakened instead by the loud clanging from their bell tower, at a time that I guessed by the light in the room to be late morning, nearly noon. I laid in bed and listened, counting the number of strokes resonating into the building by way of the open window.
Clang, clang, clang. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… but by the time I got to well past twelve, I knew that surely that time couldn’t be right. And it wasn’t. Looking at my phone, I discovered it was somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00am, just as I had expected.
All day, every day, the bells would ring at different intervals, loud enough to be heard throughout the grounds of the cloister. Their ringing quickly became one of my favorite sounds in the whole world, made sweeter by the fact that rarely will I ever hear them. It wasn’t long into our stay when I realized that the bells don’t tell you what time it is, as they do in so many crowded and urban areas. No, these bells tell you what it is time to do.
Often I ponder this fact, and how much I was touched by it. It still seems to me a bit of a mystery — time… one of those fleeting and most evasive of all earthly experiences. And what good is knowing the time, if you don’t know what it is you will do when the bells toll again? Time — what ought we to do with it? It is a question that always lingers, whether or not we feel there is too much or too little, whether we feel it is going by too fast or too slow.
Time… within it there is a question about how to live a life. I don’t know all the answers — mostly, the experience of hearing those bells, all the way across the ocean, and knowing that they are still ringing, continues to capture me with a sense of something close to wonder. Within the question, within the sound of their clanging, there is something else, barely visible through the grains of sand poured on top of it, and waiting to be sifted out. It is some sort of call to live differently, not by the arbitrary invention of man that gives concrete numbers to the moving of the sun, but by the one who first set the sun in motion. Those bells didn’t ring ominously, they didn’t make you feel anxious or rushed — they only seemed to make an inviting declaration about the day. They seem to say that for all good things, there will be time — the time to rest, to eat, to work, and to pray. Within them I hear a promise of God’s mercy, for which there is always time. I hear a proclamation of what it is we must do, and it is a proclamation full of peace. I hear the possibility of reconciliation, of conversion, and of arms open wide, an outpouring of love that gives without counting the cost. It is a possibility that makes all other good things possible.
I haven’t heard those bells in almost a year, yet it seems that daily in my own heart I hear them ringing. I feel the weight of their mystery, and I only halfway understand it. But I am grateful to hear them ringing at all.