The Silver Bells Toll

Reflections For Midwinter

Jack Frost has paid our country a visit, with a nationwide cold front filling alleys and avenues with snow. In the midst of picturesque vistas begging to feature on Christmas cards, it’s quite easy under loads of layers to forget the cold.

The cold, the absence of heat, which numbs the nerves and locks the limbs; how similar it is to death. Whilst we celebrate the coming of Our Lord as a babe, let us also meditate upon this chilling subject, and upon the other last things.

We have forgotten the terror of the winter, when the cold slides in the night, preying upon those without hearthfire or home to protect them. It was the time when monsters roamed in nigh-eternal nights, lengthened by the tilt of earth’s axis, and when stories of the sinister were told to pass the dark times.

Winter spelled death to those farmers too lazy or imprudent to sow extra to endure the hard months, and history is filled with tales of those bold enough to risk a winter military campaign…and pay a hefty price for their hubris.

If there was a time when it seemed like death reigned on earth, it would be winter. After trees produce abscisic acid to cut off their leaves, casting them down in cascading cataracts of color, they are left trampled by Ded Moroz as he taunts us, “Are you warm?”

Yet even in the winter, light remains, in the fiery form of stars blazing in the night. A particular star of note is the “Christmas Star,” the reflected light of the aligned planets Jupiter and Saturn, which only appears very rarely. 

Five  years ago, my grandfather died beneath this Christmas star, under its closest & brightest alignment since 1226, and his passing points me to the words of John Donne in his “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” Meditation XVII: “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.”

Donne further urges us to, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” On account of our common humanity, every death diminishes us like a shoreline is diminished with each grain of sand swept away by the waves.

  We sing of bells that ring on Christmas in gleaming gaiety; with each ring let us be reminded that every man’s death diminishes us because we are a part of  mankind. While these bells toll for fellow chapters in the volume of man, they toll too for us.

However, these bells are silver, like linings in storm clouds, and also remind us of the bright hopes beyond. Death for us is not the close of a story, nor a period upon our sentence, but a translation. 

Because mankind’s author wrote Himself into the world, and similarly felt death’s cold claws, He has transformed death into the very gateway into the warm light of God’s eternal day. Winter shall not be the end, but shall give way to spring.

How apt for one to die when Jupiter and Saturn meet, when a life well governed finally encounters eternity long-awaited. I pray that when the bell tolls for us, it will be to the matins and lauds of eternity, when hopes long contemplated finally come to pass.