I live beside the Catholic church in Westmeath and every single day this unmistakeable ringing of the church bell reverberates throughout the village and beyond, at 12 noon and 6 p.m. In no way can this clamour go unnoticed. The church has been there long before me so there is little I can do but accept it.
Milton Berle said, “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” I took his advice, realized that I could either take advantage of these disruptions or consent to them to being an annoyance. Fortunately, I am accustomed to eating lunch near the noon hour. Now I know precisely when lunchtime is – when the bell tolls. I am programmed to wait for that persistent reminder and then drop whatever I’m doing to get to the table.
The 6 p.m. clangs are also advantageous because if running a little behind after my usual 5:15 pm suppertime, it allows for a dash to the TV set to catch the CTV Ottawa news report.
Occasionally the bell can be a few minutes out, too fast or too slow. This causes great consternation as my schedule is now skewed until the control is reset to the correct time. Far worse though, even incapacitating, is when all clocks change to or from EST and the bell is not adjusted for a day or so.
One year, this went on for more than a few weeks. I figured the powers to be (heavenly or otherwise) were waiting out the six months until it was back on track again.
I noticed that some people with nothing better to do will count the number of chimes. I do too occasionally. There are 56 rings (3,3,3 and 47 in sequence). One day my father, out of curiosity, asked the priest if the bells had a message to send. The priest said, “It is tolling to help in the saying of the beads.” True or not, I do not know!
Then there was the bell at the Westmeath Public School when I studied there. It was a rope-pulled-one back in the day. The first bell was a five-minute warning before the last one, making you late if you weren’t on school property by then. It also rang at the end of morning and afternoon recesses calling the students back to class. It was so depended upon its absence was worrisome.
The tradition of ringing church bells dates back to 400 AD when they were first introduced in association with a church. In 604 AD, the Pope officially sanctioned bells’ usage. By the early Middle Ages, church bells had become common in northern Europe. As well, the Eastern Orthodox Church has a long and complex history of bell ringing.
In Christianity, many Anglican, Catholic and Lutheran churches ring their church bells from bell towers (a tower that contains one or more bells) three times a day, at 6 a.m., 12 p.m. and 6 p.m., summoning the faithful to say a prayer. I swear on a big stack of old Cobden Suns that if the Catholic church next door rang its bell at 6 a.m., there would be real hell to pay.
Bells are commonly rung in celebration, such as after a wedding or a service of thanksgiving. Before modern communication methods in small towns, church bells were the primary way to call the community together for all purposes, both sacred and secular. And for me, its purpose is lunch and the news.
Even as a kid, I was aware that someone at the church next door would ring the bell by pulling on a rope. The sound of the tolling after someone in the congregation died seemed much more solemn for some reason. One year it rang twice for the same person. After the first one, the dead person recovered. The second time he died many were skeptical.
Even though I live the closet to that church, the bell will never toll for me – I am not part of its flock. Pity! Somewhere along the way the ringing was digitized. Still, I had always wanted to pull the rope for a bell and my opportunity came in Wasaga Beach.
The Presbyterian church had the old-style bell tower and one Sunday morning I asked if I could do the honours. There was a brief instruction which I guess I didn’t absorb, then the time came. It required a heavier pull than I expected. The first pull didn’t make a sound but it was fine after that. I noticed though that when the rope was yanked upward it raised my feet a few inches off the floor, giving me the feel of an astronaut in outer space.
Each time it sounds, a bell’s motion begins in the mouth-upwards position. As the ringer pulls the rope the bell swings down and then back up again on the other side. During the swing, the clapper inside the bell will have struck, making the bell sound or “strike”. Each pull reverses the direction of the bell’s motion; as the bell swings, back and forth, the strokes are called “hand stroke” and “backstroke” by turns.
As North America shifted from farming to industry in the 19th century, sense of time changed radically. Before 1820, most citizens did not own clocks or even know how to tell time, and work hours were determined by the sun and the seasons. But as people by the hundreds of thousands left farms for factories, and bells divided life into segments of work and leisure, time took on new meaning. Bells announced mealtimes and rang to start and end work shifts.
In Kansas City, at the Veterans Affairs Medical Centre, ringing a bell traditionally means something noteworthy is happening. For American Veterans who complete their radiation therapy, they ring the bell. It is a way to say, “I’ve made it.” The bell was donated to the radiation oncology department by the Jewish War Veterans.
The Peace Tower Carillon, at Parliament in Ottawa, was inaugurated on July 1, 1927, the 60th anniversary of Confederation to commemorate the Armistice of 1918 and the sacrifice made by Canada during the First World War. When listening to a carillon, one is hearing bells, not a recording of bells and not synthesized bells. It is an acoustic, mechanical and manual instrument. Of the eleven carillons, the Peace Tower Carillon is the most frequently played, and the best known.
Although bells were a good idea in the Middle Ages and everyone has clocks now, the church bells next door do keep me on my schedules.
