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When I was a child, back in the 1950s, my family spent several summers at a beach on Long Island. It wasn’t too crowded during the week, but since that beach was close enough to “the city” (New York) for a day’s visit from there, even by public transportation, it was crowded on weekends.
About two blocks from where we stayed, right by the boardwalk, was a large convent, the summer vacation place for the Sisters of St. Joseph. Every day at noon, they rang the bell for the Angelus, and every day, when they did so, an astounding thing happened.
At the first sound of the bell, everyone on the beach, with amazingly few exceptions, stopped chatting or sunbathing or whatever they were doing, and stood up and silently faced the source of the sound.
The bell was loud, solemn, beautiful. It penetrated your being. It must have been heard by people far along the beach and on the streets for a way inland. And the sound flowed freely out over the ocean.
All around us, the people in bathing suits were standing, facing in the same direction. They were praying or just standing silently. Even the people in the water stood still and faced the convent.
Many of the people in that ethnic area were probably Catholic, but not everyone, of course. And even those who weren’t stood in a position of reverence.
It was an awesome sight if you were standing on the beach. It was even more so if you happened to be on the boardwalk overlooking the beach.
Through that bell, every day for a few short minutes or perhaps longer, God palpably entered into and in some measure transformed that pleasant ordinary summer scene.
***
Bells played a major role in Fr. Pat McNulty’s* journey to God. He was five or six years old at the time. Here is how he told it:
“I was standing in our backyard after supper, and I was listening to the bells of a nearby Capuchin monastery. I crossed myself and then began to weep uncontrollably. All I could do was stand there in the strange joyful and sorrowful state.
Little did I know that this moment was a watershed moment in my life, and everything else was wrapped up in the mystery of it.”
About that experience Fr. Pat later said, “I have come to understand how those bells—how deeply hearing them—touches that existential desire in each of us to finally go home.”
A deceased Madonna House priest who used to have a column in Restoration.
