Morning Bells
Who bends not his ear to any bell which on any occasion rings?
John Donne, Devotion XVII. [1]
I love to be in such places where there is no rattling with coaches nor rumbling with wheels.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. [2]
It’s autumn again on Taos Mesa. The sweet smell of burning piñon is in the air. The season’s gentle breezes are pulling the leaves in ones and twos off of our poplar, aspen, and fruit trees. Soon, stronger winds will come and strip the leaves off in great clouds, carrying them to their final resting places under the sage that covers most of the mesa.
Our transient fall season reminds me of an earlier autumn, this one, paradoxically, a permanent autumn described in a wonderful book by Johann Huizinga: The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Here, in his elegant prose, Huizinga recreates for us the life of those born to an earlier, more challenging time when people lived much closer to nature and were far more at its mercy than we moderns.
The contrast between our way of life and theirs is sharply drawn in the poignant paragraph with which Huizinga begins his story.
When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. Every event, every deed was defined in given and expressive forms and was in accord with the solemnity of a tight, invariable life style. The great events of human life—birth, marriage, death—by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery. But even the lesser events—a journey, labor, a visit—were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings, and conventions. [3]
Little things that we would scarcely notice stood in stark contrast to their surroundings. Again, calling upon Huizinga’s poetry:
Just as the contrast between summer and winter was stronger then than in our present lives, so was the difference between light and dark, quiet and noise. The modern city hardly knows pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout. [4]
Regarding Huizinga’s comment about the absence of silence in the modern city, sound engineers tell us that one measure of the quality of a city’s soundscape is whether or not it is quiet enough to hear one’s own footfalls. [5]
During my early morning walks in the mountainous region of northern New Mexico, the loudest sound I hear is that of my own footfalls. On occasions, I have been startled by the sudden sound “as of a rushing mighty wind.” [6] Yet, this strange wind leaves the air about me undisturbed. Then, having looked up a split second after hearing the sound, I realize that it was produced by a flock of birds that had just flown over me. Also, I routinely hear the swooshing sound of wings as a raven beats its way through the sky above me, an experience that leaves me thinking about John Donne’s poetry of crosses.
Looke downe, thou spiest out crosses in small things;
Looke up, thou seest birds rais’d on crossed wings;
All the Globes frame, and spheares, is nothing else
But the Meridians crossing Parallels.
Materiall Crosses then, good physicke bee,
But yet spirituall have chiefe dignity. [7]
In some ways, the surroundings here are nearer those of the Middle Ages than to that of the modern megalopolis. It is about a mile from my home to the nearest paved road. The small amount of light pollution means that on moonless nights the Milky Way and constellations like Orion seem to leap off the blackboard that is our sky, a blackboard which itself is dimly illuminated by starlight.
Here, the most common sounds are those that have remained largely unchanged down through the ages and still connect us to lives lived long ago. First, from the scattered farms and ranches in the valley that separates Taos Mesa from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the sounds of lowing cattle, braying donkeys, and whinnying horses rise up to greet me. These gentle sounds evoke the spirit of a time when people and their animals lived in a closer, more symbiotic relationship. There were no distant feedlots or chicken farms or diaries. You lived with and relied upon your own animals, and if the weather became so bad that it threatened these gentle beasts, they were brought into peasant homes where people and animals huddled together to weather life-threatening storms.
But there is another sound that regularly rises above all others to command my attention: the melodious chiming of the Westminster Quarters by the carillon of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. This church sits just west of the Taos town plaza a few miles to the south of my home. This sound echoes the tolling bells that were major features of the medieval European soundscape, when they helped set the daily rhythm of life.
The relative quiet of the medieval world gave special power to tolling bells, an effect that Huizinga aptly described in his enchanting picture of this aspect of medieval life.
[O]ne sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused with other noises, and, for a moment, lifted everything into an ordered sphere: that of the bells. The bells acted in daily life like concerned good spirits who, with their familiar voices, proclaimed sadness or joy, calm or unrest, assembly or exhortation. People knew them by familiar names: Fat Jacqueline, Bell Roelant; everyone knew their individual tones and instantly recognized their meaning. People never became indifferent to these sounds, no matter how overused they were. . . . How deafening the sound must have been when the bells of all the churches and cloisters of Paris pealed all day, or even all night, because a pope had been elected who was to end the schism or because peace had been arranged between Burgundy and Armagnac. [8]
In Mysteries of the Middle Ages, Thomas Cahill gives us another glimpse of the role of bells in medieval life. Three times daily, the bells announced the time for the Angelus prayer:
“Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae” (The angel of the Lord brought the news to Mary). As the church bells sounded at dawn, noon, and sunset, people throughout Europe stopped in their tracks, no matter what they had been doing, crossed themselves, and recited the prayer with bowed heads. [9]
The tolling of bells unified the European world of the Middle Ages. From Russia to Spain and Italy, the bells spread the Christian message of hope across Europe’s fields and forests, her towns and villages. In the words of historian Will Durant:
In the church belfry the bells rang the hours of the day or the call to services and prayer; and the music of those bells was sweeter than any other except the hymns that bound voices and hearts into one, or warmed a cooling faith with the canticles of the Mass. From Novgorod to Cadiz, from Jerusalem to the Hebrides, steeples and spires raised themselves precariously into the sky because men cannot live without hope, and will not consent to die. [10]
The power of the bells continued into George Herbert’s seventeenth-century Protestant England. At 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., the church bell announced prayer services for Herbert’s congregation. Those who were otherwise unoccupied would assemble in their church for these services. Those who could not come, such as ploughmen in the fields, stopped work and knelt in prayer. [11]
One may consider this regulating role of bells outmoded, but until quite recently here in northern New Mexico that was not the case. Mabel Dodge Luhan was a wealthy socialite and salon patron who moved from New York to Taos. In her 1935 Winter in Taos, she describes a role for the village bells that is reminiscent of the picture painted by Huizinga.
Often the sound of bells floats across the valley. Every morning at half-past six, Father rouses the village with the church bell that his Mexican rings; again at seven it peals out or comes faint and sad, according to the wind. And once more at seven-thirty.
He has the bell rung at noon and at five o’clock, so we all live, really, by Father’s time . . . [which] has always been good enough for most of us.
Once in a while the bell tolls and tolls, when someone has died, and before we had the Fire Siren at the Power House, if a building caught on fire, Father would have it run fast, with agitated summoning strokes, so everyone would rush to the village to help put out the fire.
Sometimes the bell in the morada behind our house calls the Penitentes to a Velario. This is a smaller bell than the one in the Catholic Church in the village; it has a silver treble, very high and clear. [12]
The writings of people like Roger Scruton and Thomas Merton provide additional evidence that the magic of the bells has spilled over into our own time. In News from Nowhere, Scruton noted that “bells transform the landscape, with the message of God’s love radiating over hill and dale.” The bells “bless the landscape,” bringing “God to the people in a humanized form.” They become the very “voice of the landscape, recalling us to another, slower, quieter way of living.” [13]
Like Scruton, Merton, who spent virtually all of his adult life as a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemane, believed that bells speak for God in the midst of our busy world. As he put the matter in Thoughts in Solituide:
Bells are meant to remind us that God alone is good, that we belong to Him, that we are not living for this world.
They break in upon our cares in order to remind us that all things pass away and that our preoccupations are not important. . . .
The bells say: we have spoken for centuries from the towers of great Churches. We have spoken to the saints your fathers, in their land. We called them, as we call you, to sanctity. [14]
***
We live in a time when bells and myths have lost much of their power to inspire in us the deeper, perhaps truer, sense of the mysteries of life that they conferred on our medieval ancestors. As Joseph Campbell put this matter:
[T]he spiritual symbolization of our own civilization is basically lost to us. That’s why it’s so wonderful to go to the lovely little French town of Chartres where the cathedral still dominates, and you hear the bells ring when night turns to day, and when morning turns to noon, and again when day turns to night. [15]
Like the bells of Chartres, the bells of Our Lady of Guadalupe bless me each morning with a memory of past mysteries.
[1] John Donne, “Now, This Bell Tolling Softly for Another, Says to Me: Thou Must Die,” Devotion XVII, in John Donne, Selections from Divine Poems, Sermons, Devotions, and Prayers, ed. by John Booty, in The Classics of Western Spirituality, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), p. 272.
[2] John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (New York: New American Library, nd; Signet Classic), p. 219. Problems with the noise of rumbling wagon wheels were already a source of irritation in Rome of Caesar’s day. See Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1961; a Harbinger Book), p. 218.
[3] Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p.1.
[4] Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages, p. 2.
[5] Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World (New York: Free Press, 2009), p. 60.
[6] King James Bible, Acts, 2:2.
[7] John Donne, “The Crosse,” in John Donne, Selections from Divine Poems, Sermons, Devotions, and Prayers, ed. by John Booty, in The Classics of Western Spirituality, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), p. 95.
[8] Huizinga, Autumn, pp. 2-3.
[9] Thomas Cahill, Mysteries of the Middle Ages and the Beginning of the Modern World (New York: Random House, Inc., 2006; Anchor Book), p. 165. The Angelus, Cahill tells us, is a “verse-and-response prayer originally said in monasteries.” It is “a dramatic evocation of the moment of the Incarnation, the Infleshing of the Word of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary.”
[10] Will Durant, The Age of Faith: A History of Medieval Civilization—Christian, Islamic, and Judaic—from Constantine to Dante: A.D. 325-1300, Vol. IV, in Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), p. 745.
[11] George Herbert, George Herbert: The Country Parson, The Temple, ed. by John Wall, Jr., in Classics of Western Spirituality, Richard J. Payne, editor in chief (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 7.
[12] Mabel Dodge Luhan, Winter in Taos (Taos, NM: Las Palomas de Taos, 1989. This edition was reprinted from the 1935 edition published by Harcourt, Brace, and Company, Inc.), pp. 57-58.
[13] Roger Scruton, News from Somewhere: On Settling (New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 38-40. Scruton’s title is a take-off on William Morris’s socialist utopian essay, News from Nowhere, which is itself a reference to Sir Thomas More’s original utopian essay Utopia(1516), utopia coming from the Greek word for not a place or nowhere.
[14] Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958), pp. 67-68.
[15] Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, ed. by Betty Sue Flowers (New York: Doubleday, 1988; Anchor Books), pp. 117-118.
Donald R. Baucom is a 1962 USAF Academy graduate, who earned his Ph.D. in the History of Science from the University of Oklahoma in 1976. He served twenty-eight years in the Air Force and thirteen years as the civil service historian for the Defense Department’s missile defense program. His book, The Origins of SDI, was awarded the 1992 Leopold Prize by the Organization of American Historians. Dr. Baucom retired from DOD in 2003 and now lives in El Prado, NM.