A brief encounter
One of the pleasant things for me when on ringing outings which don’t involve a quarter peal or peal or my having to organise or lead the ringing is to get a chance to look around the church you are visiting, even if only for a short while. It is wonderful to be conscious of the bells ringing as you discover a Romanesque archway above a chancel screen or perhaps, very occasionally, a seventeenth-century Laudian altar, around which there are rails on all four sides. I could go on … And then you are, from a distance, called away brusquely to ring something that demands your presence and a speedy recovery of a specific mental microchip.
Recently, while reverently taking in a church interior, I was approached by a stranger, who clearly was not a ringer but understood the place of bells in calling the faithful to worship, and asked: “Where do you find God?” Interestingly, even as a member of the clergy and indeed the Guild of Clerical Ringers, this is not a question I get asked every moment of the day. In fact, weeks, even months, can go by before I get asked the same question again. However, not to be outdone or to appear rude, given I was about to be summoned to ring something troublesome, I simply said, “Well … in the stillness of this place, many are told this is where you might discover God,” and then I disappeared abruptly to ring Pudsey. On returning, I found my stranger still there sitting in a pew, and inspiration came to me (which it did not so easily do in the Pudsey) and I said something like: “You might expect to find God here but equally you might find God in any place. It is more, perhaps through God’s grace, that we may come to sense that God works through faint prods and prompts as we desire an understanding. If we undertake a journey of faith, we might just come to know that the wisdom and the knowledge of God are within us all the time, just lingering to be revealed.” I imagine this stranger by now guessed I was a bit of a ringing-vicar, especially when I added that the message of God becoming human in Jesus is that God can dwell within us and live in us, if we invite him to do so.
Anyway, it was lunchtime, the ringing finished, and the stranger went on his own journey (bemused or otherwise). I have to say though I did personally on the whole feel better for that brief encounter. And yes, I can ring Pudsey.
Jonathan Rose