To Tintinnabulate or Not

So far nobody has asked me that we ring the church bell at Swanvale Halt on January 31st to celebrate the UK's departure from the European Union. I wonder how well the campaign to make this happen across the land is doing more generally. I see that the bit of www.Leave.eu that refers to it has, since I last visited, removed some insulting references to the Archbishop of Canterbury (who, God knows, many of us have some frustrations with), but there are still all the purported parallels with World War Two, despite many Leavers trying to tell us that nobody ever, ever draws on that rhetoric and to say that folk do is a Remainer smear. Ah well, that's by the by really.

When new bells are installed in churches they are, traditionally, not just blessed as any other bit of kit might be but hallowed in a ceremony referred to as Baptism, which suggests that there is something special about them which doesn't apply to statues, altar hangings, candlesticks, or anything else you might find around a church. I suspect this is because bells speak and therefore have a life about them which other inanimate objects don't no matter what holy uses to which they might be put. And what do they speak? In a way they are the voice of God. They summon, they proclaim, they announce his joy and his sorrow. They do not vocalise what we feel, but what he does, and our task is to align our wills with his. That means we ought to be very careful about how we use them. I genuinely do not presume to know what the Lord's opinion might be of the forthcoming shift in the international status of the United Kingdom, and so I will not try to speak for him.

Swanvale Halt only has one bell anyway. If anyone has a million quid or more down the back of the sofa to construct a bell tower it would be splendid to have a few more!