Bell

Once you give it away, it’s not yours anymore: a harsh lesson often learned under duress. My congregation, through its governing board, gave away an old bell to a neighboring new congregation. The bell was not made as a church bell. It was made as a bell for a locomotive, and when you rang it, it sounded like the train was on its way. We hadn’t used it for years. It had hung in a decrepit and long demolished structure that people who had not been to church for 20 or 30 years remembered but many of the current congregation had never seen, and they had never heard the bell ring. It languished outside the Sunday school rooms in a utility closet for some time. When the neighboring congregation with its new house church building was looking for a bell, we gave it to them. So that pastor and I lifted it, put it in the truck and moved it to its new home, where it was rung, especially to the delight of children. Several years later that congregation folded, its property was dispersed, and I do not know what happened to the bell. But I do know that some long, long, long time parishioners of my own church still resented its loss. They had lost something they had given away. When you give something away, it’s not yours anymore: a painful lesson whether it’s an old dresser, an old book, a car or a bell. I suppose there’s a sermon in here somewhere about what has been given away for us, what has been given away by us, in a spirit of love, or of housecleaning, and what has been given away to us. Given away, largely by one we have never seen in the flesh. As I say this, I can see from my porch the vultures circling over something that has lost any chance of being given away or received as a gift, but only taken. Jesus wasn’t in the tomb long enough to do more than begin to stink, as Martha and Mary had said of his friend Lazarus. He had been alive long enough for the vultures to have been circling in anticipation for years, and then he went ahead with it. He went ahead with giving away his love, his life and the gifts of love and life that he gave to others; gifts that we never recovered, but only passed on. Perhaps we should do as well to let go of the things that we have given away, and not attempt to recover them, or to resent their departure.

 Bell : an essay for the Buechner writing project of the Christian Century.