March 31, 2006
Bells
A fabulous array of elements make up the cosmos and connect it intimately as if it were some living cell. Indeed do they move through the aeons and the ether suddenly to merge in their midst into us, of all people, both fervently aware of self and wondering enough to discover and know that the me is indeed we, all sorts of we’s, animate and inanimate.
We call it creation, a loaded word that implies a maker, a mind, and the abounding evidence that it is so. We can’t with integrity turn away from it. Like all of what we call life, it is made in cycles and helices and with a peculiar language of its own, telling our story, as it were.
T S Eliot put it rather profoundly like this: “The dance along the artery / The circulation of the lymph / Are figured in the drift of the stars.”
But the stars are not all that drift, for so do the massive undergirdings of our planet, the one of which we’re all made. Whenever they break and crush in their growing pains, so do we, sometimes hardly even noticeably, sometimes catastrophically. That this earth can consume us in its orgies as it often does wreaks heartbreaking tragedy, for we are as profoundly sentient as it seems not to be.
Our calendar today recalls Poet John Donne. He is a recall that we Anglicans, who make such long claims and have such short memories, can use recalling about. He pondered thoughts not altogether unlike this and yet with a startling rhythm of his own. No one of us is an island entire of itself, he told us, but “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, no. 6)
And just to think, if I’d never heard of Ernest Hemingway, I may never have learned about that bell at all.