Welcome to our Renewing Hope Advent Calendar of stories, sent to recipients of Grapevine or Working Together. We invite you to open a story a day between now and Christmas Eve to open a window onto the ministry and mission in our Diocese. Please do share on with friends and family and neighbours!
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14th December
The church bells of our nation fell totally silent in March and remained so until July, the first time that this has happened since the Second World War. Hearing the bells ring out on Christmas Morning is one of the most iconic sounds of the festive season, but for many churches Covid restrictions mean that won't be possible this year. For others, limited ringing with social distancing may be possible.
We open our 14th window on our Advent Calendar of Comfort and Joy to find out how this will be a very different festive season for our bellringers.
'Ring Out Those Bells Tonight'
Robert Wellen Guild Master, Salisbury Diocesan Guild of Bell Ringers
We were delighted that in the late summer and early autumn there was restricted Sunday service ringing in some towers and of course some of us have been involved in some virtual ringing, on our computers. But for ringers and worshippers alike, there is something special about bells on Christmas morning. Let us pray that we will be allowed to share in that joy this Christmas.
Many of our ringers have been ‘counting down the days’ to when they can ring and socialise together again. There will be no more joyous occasion than when we can gather again for a ‘Ringers Tea’! In the meantime we gather on Zoom and catch up. Thats where I heard from Eric Hitchins, who celebrated his 90th birthday in November. Eric actually learnt to ring during that 1940s ringing ban, so the 'no ringing' restrictions were not new to him, and to celebrate his birthday he did a ‘Captain Tom’ and raised in the region of £2,000 for future bell restoration throughout the Diocese.
Concerns have rightly been expressed about the long-term impact on ringing of this year’s events. I however refuse to be pessimistic and I continue to be comforted by what I know of ringers.
There is another ‘bug’ and most ringers have it; it’s ‘the ringing bug’, and once infected there is no vaccine or cure. Your ringers will not be going away.
Neither will your bells, they are still ‘up there’, waiting quietly and patiently; after all many of them are medieval and have ‘seen this all before’, and soon they will be reunited with your ringers to fulfil their and our calling.
So I take my ‘comfort and joy’ from the continued bond between the Church and its bells. So wrote a Suffolk clergyman in August 1940 when the bells were last silenced: “... we need a prayerful nation, a people ever listening for those calls which draw them together. What are those calls? What is one of the sweetest and most familiar, known down the ages? The church bells. Let this song of England ring out again each Sunday”.
Amen to that!
Happy Christmas from all the bell ringers of the Diocese.
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