Too much noise, not enough sound

As I lay in bed this morning, I heard the bells of St. John's Abbey Church ring the hour, calling people to prayer and announcing the beginning of my last day at the conference I am attending in Minnesota.

There are people who detest the sound of church bells and town clocks, but I am mystified by their irritation. To me the ringing of bells is never an intrusion.

London's Big Ben, the Staunton town clock, church bells on Sunday morning connect me to people across the centuries who have heard these bells announcing Sabbath, celebrating marriages, tolling for the dead, ringing in the new year, heralding the outbreak of peace following the scourge of war, or simply marking the hours and seasons of our lives.

Most of the sounds I hear were never heard by anyone until recently. Even my grandparents almost made it to adulthood without the sounds of tractors, cars and trucks, the pop-up toaster and electric alarm clock, radios and televisions, the hum of refrigerators and the dull roar of central heat. They might have heard a train in the distance, but most of the sounds that formed the backdrop for their lives had been heard by people for thousands of years: horses and dogs, the squeak of wagon wheels, a scoop filling with animal feed, the coal scuttle being emptied into fireplace or stove, wind and rain, and talking, talking, talking. They heard people singing unrecorded, unamplified, unbroadcast.

In the space of just one generation, sounds that had companioned people through life since the beginning of time were drowned out by newly created sounds. Even though I live downtown, I can hear the bells from the town clock only in the dead of night when the windows are open.

My parents' house has central air-conditioning for which I am grateful on hot, sticky days, but when I go to bed at night, I shut the door to my room and open the window.

I don't think it is the night air I am after; it is the music of the night: crickets and frogs and occasionally some weird bird I can't identify that stays awake in the dark.
With the first hint of dawn, the birds begin to sing in the day, calling the sun to rise in the sky and me to ease ever so gently toward consciousness.

There are no bells in their neighborhood, but I would welcome them breaking into the clutter of my busyness calling me back to myself. I need their ancient voice reaching into the depths of my being bearing messages from those who have come before me and those who will follow when I return to dust.

I have met interesting people at this conference, learned a few things I needed to know, but when I wake up on Sunday morning at my parents' house in North Carolina, what I think I will miss is the sound of the bells ringing from St. John's Abbey Church.

The bells won't be entirely absent, though. They will keep ringing in my memory for many dawns to come.

Patricia Hunt is a Mary Baldwin College
chaplain and Staunton resident.