In April 27th’s New Yorker, Elif Batuman tells in “The Bells” (ohhh I hear an internal rhyme) how people in the Russian Orthodox faith believe bells are “aural icons” not mere musical instruments. In fact, Russian bells sound, as Father Roman, a famous bell ringer, put it, “deep, sonorous and clear, for how can the voice of God be otherwise?”
Big Ben weighs 13 tons but one in Russia called Tsar Kolokol actually weighed in at 200 tons!
Batuman tells the fascinating story of how eighteen Dailov monastery bells (from 22 pounds to thirteen tons) made it to a tower in Lowell House in Harvard Square in 1930 and how, after 78 years, they were returned to Russia last September. Thanks to a generous philanthropist, Harvard got a new set so they can still ring out victories against Yale games.
We know of one bell from “Ba-bel-lon” that is 5,000 years old. Bells have to be carefully cast, and for years that was a priestess/monastic craft. Wars gobbled many of them up and spit them out as for cannon balls. In Russia, a Communist regime turned many of them into tractors.
With so many tea-bagging people right now proclaiming their American rights are somehow being ursurped, I look at our cracked Liberty Bell and think, “Are we flawed, as a people? Are we no longer ‘sound as a bell’ or ‘clear as a bell’? Do we clunk?"
My friend Kathryn is a bell ringer in Islip, England. In spite of a close up demonstration, I still don’t understand “change ringing” where in each “round” 5-12 bells each sound a musical note and are rung in a particular sequence and then the order is changed and a new permutation is created. If Kathryn and her bell-ringing friends ring their 5 bells through all the possible 120 permutations, they’d get back to the original pattern again and that would be a “peal of bells.” And if they ever tackled 12 bells…well, they’d have to be up to pulling those ropes to create over 479 million changes in order to reach the original pattern.
I find bells to be loaded metaphors for the sorts of “change ringing” Obama is calling for. But right now we seem to be tripping on the permutations. I hold out great optimism that we will reach a consensus “peal” before too long.
And with some careful consideration, we may one day revere bells the way the Russians do. Tones reverberate and are amplified through our bodies—for healing, many say—and some bells can still be heard long after they’ve been rung. Some say even after the churches that hosted them have disappeared. If we listen long and hard enough, we may be able to pluck from the airwaves Mother Earth bell ringing from Danilov’s restored bell tower.
Rudolph Steiner predicted that the "Christ Essence" sort of Christianity would one day be revived in Mother Russia. Sophia is revered there, deep down in the soil, and people remember through all the decades of trying to make them forget, that Her Bells are calling us again. Wielding webs of ropes, gifted ringers still remind us we are more than we see.
Seamus Heaney, in a wonderful new biography called Stepping Stones (by Dennis O’Driscoll), said Yeats had a “marvelous gift for beating the scrap metal of the day-to-day life into a ringing bell.” We need not be poets or accomplished bell ringers to take ordinary scraps of today and turn them into vibrating peals of joy. We can all be “change ringers.”
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