I spent the past couple of weeks in Wisconsin at my seminary, Nashotah House. There are many reasons why I love to be up there—the natural beauty, the intellectual and spiritual community, the liturgical richness. The beautiful chapel of St. Mary the Virgin is perpetually redolent of incense; it is a place to “kneel where prayer has been valid,” as T.S. Eliot wrote of Little Gidding. But one of the most prominent features of “the House” (as it is affectionately known) is the thrice-daily ringing of the Angelus from the one-ton bell in the main quad. The bell rings the Angelus to begin Mattins and Evensong. It rings at 12:30 to signal the end of morning classes, and no matter if a professor is in mid-sentence, everyone stops, rises, and prays.
I mention this because the bell isn’t just a bell; rather, it has a name—Michael. Michael bears an inscription from the Venite: “Come, let us worship and fall down and kneel before the Lord our Maker.” It is fitting, then, that the voice of Michael has faithfully and daily called the House to worship since 1884. On September 29, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, the House celebrates Michael’s name day by going out after Mass and ringing Michael in a fit of joyful tintinnabulation.
Hearing Michael’s voice three times a day caused me to give some thought to why we use bells in the Church. In an age of watches and smartphones, surely the practical purpose of bells could be served, well, more practically. So, is there perhaps a deeper spiritual purpose to their use?
The earliest mention we have of bells in the Church comes in the sixth century, where they were used to summon communities and monasteries to services. In the eighth century, Pope Stephen II erected a belfry with three bells (campanae) at St. Peter’s Basilica. By this time, bells had come to be an integral part of a church’s furnishings, and exterior towers for the purpose of holding larger bells began to be constructed. Around this time, as well, an elaborate ceremony for the consecration of bells emerged.
This consecration rite is a fascinating key to the theology and use of church bells. The blessing has always been reserved to a bishop, which is typical for all blessings involving the most sacred of the church’s appurtenances—for example, chalices, patens, altar stones, and the church building itself. The rite begins with a series of seven psalms (generally of a penitential character) and the blessing of holy water. He then asperses the bell while Psalms 145-150, which speak of the praise of God, are chanted. He then prays that the bell will be blessed, recalling that the Lord “decreed through blessed Moses, your servant and lawgiver, that silver trumpets should be made and be sounded at the time of sacrifice, in order to remind the people by their clear tones to prepare for your worship and to assemble for its celebration.”
He then identifies the specific purposes for which the bell is to sound: “Let the people’s faith and piety wax stronger whenever they hear its melodious peals. At its sound let all evil spirits be driven afar; let thunder and lightning, hail and storm be banished; let the power of your hand put down the evil powers of the air, causing them to tremble at the sound of this bell, and to flee at the sight of the holy cross engraved thereon.”
He then anoints the bell with seven crosses on the outside with the Oil of the Sick and four crosses on the inside with Sacred Chrism, as Psalm 29 is chanted. The anointing of the crosses is intended to coincide with each invocation of “the Voice of the Lord” in the psalm. Finally, the bell is blessed and consecrated in the Name of the Lord and in honor of a particular saint. There are several more prayers, a psalm, and the rite concludes with the reading of the story of Mary and Martha from Luke’s gospel. This is a fairly involved affair!
As we can see, the naming of a church bell is not a custom unique to Nashotah House. It is an ancient Catholic practice that when a bell is blessed, it is dedicated to a particular saint and receives a name, likely due to a sense that each bell has its own unique “voice.” The custom of asperging and naming the bell led to this rite being termed (incorrectly, but by analogy) the “baptism of the bell.” The bell may not be “baptized,” but it is set apart from creation with a particular identity, for a particular purpose. When it rings, it speaks in some sense with “the Voice of the Lord,” and its pealing gives praise and worship to its Creator.
The rite of blessing identifies several purposes for the ringing of the bell: It is 1) to call the faithful to worship, 2) to awaken the “faith and piety” of the people of God, 3) to drive away storms, and 4) to banish the demonic powers of the air. A medieval Latin couplet echoes this: “Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum, / Defunctos ploro, nimbum fugo, festa decoro” (“I praise the True God, I call the people, I gather the clergy, / I bewail the departed, I disperse the storm-clouds, I pay honor to feasts”). This matter of mourning the dead also speaks to another typical use of the church bell: it is customarily tolled when a parishioner dies to call for prayers for the departed soul.
Calling together the people for prayer seems like an obvious enough use for the bell. We may ask, though, what is this business about banishing demons and dispersing storms? Demons have historically been associated with the “kingdom of the air.” For instance, in Ephesians, St. Paul refers to Satan as “the prince of the power of the air” (2:2). Likewise, in his treatise On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius writes the following of the Crucifixion: “For thus being lifted up He cleared the air of the malignity both of the devil and of demons of all kinds” (§25). The connection between the fluid and unseen elemental forces of the air and the “principalities and powers” that work man’s woe has been around since the beginning. It is not unreasonable from a Christian understanding to believe that the sound of a consecrated bell traveling through the air is a hateful and terrifying thing to those powers!
Equally, the violent interruption of the normal orderliness of the atmosphere with stormy chaos continues to be a threat to human life and property, a fact of which I am reminded after the recent spotting of a funnel cloud a mile to our north. Believing that the sound of a bell can drive away storms might seem like a benighted relic of a premodern past ignorant of meteorology. (When the tornado sirens were going off the other night, I confess that I didn’t hop in the car and drive to church to ring the bell!) But it also speaks to the fact that we still inhabit a creation that “groaneth and travaileth in pain” (Rom. 8:22) and that still bears the wounds of man’s fall. The ringing of the bell during a storm is in essence a prayer that “the Voice of the Lord” will deliver us from chaos and disorder, just as that Voice called forth creation and order from the chaos-waters of the primordial void.
This understanding also reminds us that we inhabit a sacramental world, a world in which created things mean and do more than we can say from a purely empirical or materialist viewpoint. In a sacramental world, the bell is no longer just an object of a particular metallic composition that, when struck, reverberates at a particular frequency and emits sound waves of a particular pitch and tone. Rather, it is a creature that has been drawn through the Church’s blessing into the sacramental economy of grace, set apart to serve God’s purposes, to give Him glory, and to herald His goodness, mercy, and love. To ring the bell is to reject the disenchantment of modernity, in which creation only ever points to itself and never to its Creator. It is to testify with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” (“God’s Grandeur”). It is to announce that God lovingly governs His creation and brings us into His divine life through the simple material goods of bread, wine, water, salt, oil, palms, ashes, and the metal of a bell. Because we are incarnate beings, He comes to us through the thing-iness of our incarnate life, chiefly in His glorious assumption of our fleshly human nature. The ringing of the bell proclaims that mystery; it truly speaks with “the Voice of the Lord.”
And in all of this, I have only been speaking of the main church bell. We, of course, have other bells in the church: the bell we ring at the beginning of Mass, the sanctus bells we ring throughout the liturgy. These bells, too, ring to awaken and arouse our piety; they signal to us that a mystery is unfolding to which we must attend. The bells ring during the Sanctus to inform us that we are no longer on earth but in heaven. The bells ring during the consecration to alert us to the central mystery of our Eucharistic life. Likewise, the bells fall silent during the Sacred Triduum to join with us in mourning our Lord, just before they jubilantly ring out His triumph over death at the Easter Vigil.
Thus, bells in the Church are never merely a pleasant (or distracting, depending on your view!) sonic ornament. They are practical, but they point to a richer and deeper reality in which we live and move and have our being. They call us back into the sacramental world that we can so easily forget. They demand attention in an age when it is a scarce resource. As Romano Guardini writes, “And the heavy bronze bells in the belfrey tower, so beautifully molded, swing about their shaft and send out peal on peal in waves of good loud sound. High and quick, or full-toned and measured, or roaring deep and slow, they pour out a flood of sound that fills the air with news of the Kingdom” (Sacred Signs, 42). And so it is that over the past two weeks, I was glad to have renewed my friendship with Michael, the bell. He “fills the air with news of the Kingdom.” He witnesses devoutly and robustly to God’s grandeur and goodness, even when my own prayers are flagging, weak, and distracted.