The Bells That Invite Us To Pause
One of my favorite parts of being in Italy is listening to the ringing of church bells. I rarely have to look at my cell phone to know the time. All I have to do is listen for the bells, the campane.
I first fell in love with Italian bells on an extended stay a few years ago in the central Italian city of Cassino. Our apartment was around the corner from Chiesa San Antonio, the oldest Catholic church in the city, where my paternal grandparents Giovanna Mastronardi and Carlo Valente were married.
The campane chimed every hour. Twelve chimes, for instance, to signal noon. Often some quick ringing would follow the chimes for the hour, as if to say, “Are you paying attention?” A single chime would mark the half hour.
In those first weeks in Cassino, the blaring sound of the bells would wake me in the middle of the night. After a while, they became comforting background music. I looked forward to hearing them. I missed them when I returned to the U.S.
I am now in the south-central town of Guardiagrele in the region of Abruzzo There are nine Catholic churches spread across the town center. Not all ring bells, both those that do each produce a sound that has its own unique timbre.
The bells atop of the largest church, Santa Maria Maggiore, peel with a powerful resonance that pulses through your chest if you happen to be standing nearby. Their sound overpowers the many conversations occurring in the piazza below. It’s as though the bells are inviting us to pause, to be silent.
If the campane of Santa Maria Maggiore are like bass singers, those of the Chiesa San Nicola di Bari down the street are baritones, not quite as deep and strong. The bells of La Madonna del Carmine, Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, have a lighter, soprano tone, befitting a church that honors a woman.
The ringing of church bells recalls an ancient monastic practice for alerting monks and monastic sisters of the times to pause during the day for community prayer. It is a time to stop whatever you are doing and place your attention more completely on the presence of God.
In her book, The Monastic Heart, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister says monastic bells “wrench our attention back to what is really important in life: the memory of God in our midst. The bells signal “there are more important, more meaningful, more demanding dimensions of life than anything ordinary we might be doing as they ring.”
The bells prod us to to ask ourselves: are we making good use of our time? “No bedroom clocks, no personal watches take their place as harbingers of spiritual time,” Sister Joan says.
U.S. church bells peel mainly on Sundays, and it’s for a purpose. They are a call to worship, signaling that the service will soon begin. Some churches forgo using bells because of the cost of maintaining them. Some U.S. communities have ordinances restricting the ringing of church bells to Sundays. Their sound is considered a form of noise pollution.
That misses something important. The campane help us to remember that there is a dimension beyond what we might be experiencing in the moment. They lift us from whatever the demands or difficulties of our day might be and remind us we are made for something vaster and more mysterious. We are made for wonder.
This week, can we listen for the sound of bells, wherever we might be? And if they aren’t ringing, perhaps we still can pause periodically at certain hours to become more aware of our surroundings, to feel a sense of wonder, and to remember that we are always in the presence of the sacred.
