Beauty of Bells in Our Lives!

Bells… “tintinnabulations of the Bells, Bells…” sung out Edgar Allen Poe..

The concept of these ringing marvels have maintained a storied place throughout history. They seem well ensconced into the fabric of our minds, memories and hearts.

We’ve all been “saved by the bell”during those school days when our assignment was not completed, or it was just too warm to be inside a classroom on a warm late spring afternoon.

People in San Francisco would stop on and off the trolley, to the sounds of a bell. Trains and buses of the world would suddenly slow down or stop. Ice cream trucks would herald the arrival of sweet delectables to children. Bells are indeed powerful things, ersatz, living things. Actually, very few people question a bell. It’s as if we render the bell our full faith and complicity.

In years, people were summoned by bells to assist in fires, pending disasters, and other natural calamities in American frontier villages. And did those bells ring joyfully at the end of wars.

Minutemen were ready at the sound of a musket and bell, bells peel at the coronation of a new king or pope, and, of course, the clarion bells of Christmas mornings.

Bells need not be great or large, just efficient and comforting, even for our every day lives. The little chime on our egg timers surely have good purpose and the chimes in our vehicles remind us to safely protect our very lives.

Thank God for being in a world, which can easily reverberate the sound of a Bell.

I’ve always had a personal particular affinity for bells as they’ve been not only ritualistic in my life, but serving as potent reminders of the chapters of life.

The chapel bells rang from my hometown church in Bellaire Ohio, the morning of my baptism.

As an altar, boy, I would ring the little bell heralding the beginning of the mass as people were summoned to look up and pray.

The capula bell rang between classes at my university summoning students to class on a promising crisp afternoon. The chimes rang before my long sessions in law school, and at exit time. The bells even rang, albeit in my head, after I fell and hit my head during soccer games.

And 40 years later, as I thanked God, as I rang the symbolic little gold bell at the end of my chemotherapy.

People speculate, as for whom the bell tolls, but it’s all just speculation. A Bell, a beautiful yet simple instrument, is sophisticated in design and quite potent, for as we know, a bell cannot truly be “unrung”.

So, for all those important as well as mundane moments of our live- may our bells ring sweet and strong… they relay such great meaning.

“School is in Session”, “Blessed Be God” and of course “Let Freedom Ring”… from every valley and mountain top…be echoed to the corners of our collective souls.