I’ve always loved bells. I got some ringing bells for the Mansion meditation class, and love the sound, I use it at home when I meditate or just sit quietly to read or think.

I remembered a meditation on bells by Thomas Merton, and I found it in his book “Thoughts In Solitude”, which I read often, especially when I was up on the mountain, writing Running To The Mountain. I love Merton, even though his faith is quite different from mine. His ideas and values transcend theology.

I’ve always loved the sound of bells ringing, but I never once thought about why, or what they meant to me. I went back to his essay on bells this evening, I know this book almost by heart. That year I was close to people, yet I lived in near total isolation, I experienced solitude in a completely different way.

When I lived up on the mountain, I sometimes heard bells ringing from far away in the valley, they helped me to see what those bells must have meant years ago when the world was quiet, before cars and planes and trucks and TV’s and cell phones. Those bells must have cut through the silence like angels coming to offer comfort and hope.

When I am in cities now, I realize that the noise drowns out the bells, they can scarcely be heard, if at all.

In the religious sense, Merton wrote, bells are meant to remind the devout that God alone is good, that we are not living for this world, but for the next.

I am not a religious person, yet I understand the power of bells, and they speak to me of important things: they break in my distractions and worries and remind me that all living this pass away, most of our preoccupations and anxieties are not important, although we think they are the most important things in the world.

Bells speak of freedom, which fear and worry allow us to forget. We drift into lives of servitude and disconnection without even thinking about it. I see people working for money and living by the ideas and feelings of others.  A kind of slavery.

A long time reader messaged me yesterday asking – actually demanding – that I write about the danger of rope toys to dogs. I told him I didn’t post warnings on my blog, not about dogs, not about people,  there are many other places to go that are happy to do that. I don’t want to be one of them.

I am never more in need of the spiritual life than I am when someone tells me what to write, or hates me for writing what I want. Maybe I need some bells in my study.

He was angry, e-mailing that he was done with me, asking me in what he thought to be a clever sarcastic voice if I would continue to be sanctimonious and hypocritical. I said I promised that I would remain sanctimonious, and I would never permit other people to tell me what to write on my blog.

I could, I said, only be me.

He asked if I was trying to be funny, and I said no, I was quite serious.

He went away, I remembered why I hated Middle School. As I got up from my computer to cook dinner, I thought I heard bells ringing. They were sing-song bells, more than one. I thought I was going a little mad, I was uneasy and off base all day.

There is a church a few miles down the road, but I can’t recall every hearing it before. I remember reading somewhere that the bells were angels sent down to the world to remind us of song and lift our spirits.

I am sure I wasn’t hearing a real bell, how could I be so sure? Perhaps it was an angel reminding me to be me,  asking me who else could I possibly be?

I don’t hear the bells now.

Bells are my music of the spiritual, of the world that calls out to me, even if I can never quite fully get there. I am just too imperfect. I hear them rarely in my life on the farm, but they always touch me.

Bells call me to a place of worship, no matter what the religion. Perhaps they were calling me away from my unhappy former reader.

They lure me to the True Temple, they call me to the spiritual life, a life beyond worry and anger and ambition and pettiness.

The bells have always reminded me of these things, they summon me to a higher place.

“The bells say this,” wrote Merton: “We have spoken for centuries from the towers of great Churches. We have spoken to the saints your fathers, in their land. We call them as we cal you, to sanctity”

We call you to answer the cries of the poor and the needy.

“And this, our message, has always been for everyone, for those who came and for those who did not come, for our song is perfect and we pour our charity out upon all.”