Sitting in class at Rutgers a strange thing has been happening: the local Episcopal church has begun ringing its bell hourly.  This is my fourth semester there, and this is the first time I have noticed it, and for me it is taken for granted---I have always belonged to a church that has bells, electronic or (gasp!) the real, metal bell.  I have fond memories of being catapulted into the air as I held fast to a bell rope, and then descending slowly back to earth again.

The new bell ringing has been granted with a subdued disdain, a nuisance perhaps, by many in the Rutgers community.  It interrupts their thoughts, is loud, and seems out of place.  For some, it might sound like their cell phone alarm, and they are aggravated by a reminder that is not personal.

And that is what I think the biggest shock of the ringing bell is: it is not individual but communal.  We have become greedy for time and bend it to our will by personalizing it.  We don't get up at dawn, we get up precisely when we set our alarms, and when that fails we have snooze buttons to personalize our whims further.  We have individual calendars and individual phones to mark time for us individually.  It is almost as if the time-space continuum has become personalized.

But then the bell tolls, and it tolls for all to hear.  Time becomes a communal event.  Six times during class: 5:30, 6:00, 6:30, 7:00, 7:30, and 8:00 PM the bell chimes a song that reminds everyone that they are existing in time together, and that it is passing for all of us.  It also reminds us that we can do nothing to stop it.  The bell cannot be turned off, it cannot be silenced---it will ring whether we want it to or not. 

Time is an interesting thing, as anyone who has gazed at a Dali painting will realize.  But I think the egomaniacal artist was correct in the way Time passes as a melt instead of grains of sand in a timepiece.  The grains of time do not dissipate without a trace, they leave a film, an ooze, a mark on our lives as they pass through our fingertips.  And when a bell rings, it does not pour like sand it oozes like a melting clock---it stops us in our tracks---and we reflect on what happened in between each toll.  Time has the ability to drift away unnoticed in a 24/7 age of instant access, but when a bell tolls it makes Time seem finite, and that scares us just like a surrealist painting.

O God, let us remember that Time is in your hands, and we are but a short breathe in the history of the cosmos.