“By their cars you shall know them” said a colleague of the cars parked in the conference car park. There is a lot of truth in his remark. Cars are a statement about their owner, and sometimes intended to be so. The high-powered expensive vehicles, marking a wedding, racing up and down the inner city street on which we lived, were not necessarily making a statement of which the prophet of Islam would have approved, if my reading is correct. The statement cars make is not entirely unambiguous. How pleasant it is to be let into a stream of traffic by a Chelsea
tractor. Friend, I misjudged you. And as my college friend stated with the sticker in the rear window of his very modest vehicle, “This car is in front of you, and it is paid for.” Bells make a statement too. They are used to mark the time, a precious gift. The world’s most famous bell marking time is the currently silent Big Ben, with its chime
borrowed from the University Church of Great St Mary’s in Cambridge. Bells are used to announce “Christ is
risen”, worship is beginning, prayer is about to happen. It was wonderful to hear the bell chime out across the fishing lake on a Wednesday morning after a long silence. Mercifully nobody rings bells these days to mark political success or a horse coming first at Epsom. The statement bells make is not entirely unambiguous. There are bells in Morpeth
Watch Tower and Berwick Town Hall. The exceptions do not prove the rule though. “Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel” is the inscription in Latin on Great Paul at St Paul’s Cathedral, London. It is the largest bell in Britain.
Dale Barton, Bingley
Easter 2021