When Angels Heard The Bells
Growing up in the desert of Southern California, I would look up at the tower of my childhood parish and always feel a twinge of sadness that it remained mute. In so many movies, you always saw these grand bell towers that tolled the hours and marked the passage of time. Whether it be The Bells of St. Mary’s or Quasimodo, the silent guardian of time at famed Notre Dame, there was something intrinsic about time and the Church. It almost seemed contradictory — that the visual representation of God’s timelessness should be the avatar of very human time.
When I moved to Ohio, those movies came to life. Bells rang out from their towers! At long last, I knew the time — at least on the hour.
It’s easy to think of church bells as mere timekeepers — quaint relics from before wristwatches and smartphones. But in truth, the bell is far more than an instrument of sound. In the Church’s tradition, it is a consecrated voice, dedicated to the glory of God.
A church bell is not simply installed; it is baptized. The rite of consecration mirrors, in many ways, the baptism of a Christian. The bell is washed with holy water, anointed with holy oil, and named. In older rituals, incense is burned within it, filling the hollow interior like a living soul. It is blessed to drive away storms, to call the faithful to prayer, to honor the dead, and to announce the mysteries of salvation.
The ancient Rituale Romanum captures this mystery beautifully. In the prayer of consecration, the bishop intones:
“At the sound of its voice, may the faithful be invited to the faith; may all the snares of the enemy, the crash of hailstorms, the harm of tempests, and the fury of winds be banished; may the deadly thunderbolt be broken; may the devout, when they hear its sound, be strengthened in the fear of the Lord; may the power of air be tempered; may the health of the sick be restored; may the air be made wholesome; may all evil spirits be driven afar; and may the power of Thy holy angels ever dwell within the places where its sound shall be heard.”
That final line is staggering: “may the power of Thy holy angels ever dwell within the places where its sound shall be heard.”
The bell doesn’t merely measure time; it blesses it. It calls not just to men and women, but to heaven itself — summoning angels to stand guard over the hours. Every toll is both a call and a consecration: a reminder that even the passing of time belongs first to God. And it does this for all who hear it.
But there was more. There was also this prayer called the Liturgy of the Hours.
As I began to learn more, I realized it was something far deeper: the Church’s way of keeping time with God. The very hours of the day were baptized into prayer — dawn, noon, evening, night — all sanctified, all belonging to Him. It was as if every moment had a door through which grace could enter, if only one stopped long enough to open it. If bells are for us all in community, this could be for the individual.
The Liturgy of the Hours is, in a sense, the Church’s heartbeat. Long before the invention of the mechanical clock, monasteries ordered the day around prayer, not production. The first timekeepers of the West weren’t merchants or mathematicians, but monks. Their bells divided the day not by labor, but by love — reminding the world that time itself is a gift, not a commodity.
The Liturgy of the Hours — sometimes called the Divine Office — is the Church’s way of praying with time itself. From sunrise to sunset, even through the quiet of night, every hour is claimed and consecrated by prayer. It is not simply a series of recitations, but a pattern of sanctification — a reminder that no part of the day is spiritually neutral.
Traditionally, the day is divided into eight parts:
Matins (or Vigils): In the deep of night, before dawn — a time of watchfulness and longing.
Lauds: Early morning, as light returns to the world; praise rising with the sun.
Prime (now suppressed): The first hour after sunrise, dedicating the workday to God.
Terce: Midmorning, recalling the coming of the Holy Spirit.
Sext: Noon, when the sun stands at its height — and when Christ hung upon the Cross.
None: Mid-afternoon, marking the Lord’s death and the slow turning toward evening.
Vespers: Evening prayer — thanksgiving as the day closes and the light fades.
Compline: Night prayer — rest, forgiveness, and surrender to God’s keeping.
As the Psalmist says, “Seven times a day I praise You for Your righteous ordinances” (Psalm 119:164). The early Christians took this literally, shaping their day around the rhythm of praise. St. Benedict, in his Rule, wrote simply:
“Let nothing be preferred to the Work of God.”
To the Benedictines, “the Work of God” meant prayer — specifically, the keeping of the Hours. This rhythm ordered everything else. The ringing of bells across Europe was not merely to tell time; it was the call to sanctify it. In monasteries, towns, and eventually parishes, life moved to this sacred tempo — ora et labora — prayer and work, perfectly intertwined.
When I think back to that silent tower in my childhood parish, I sometimes wonder what it would sound like if its bells rang out for the ordinary holiness of a passing hour. It isn’t merely nostalgia. It’s the ache for something that once ordered the world rightly: a time that was not owned by industry or politics or profit, but by prayer.
In the modern world, we no longer hear time; we only see it. It glows at us from screens, flashes on dashboards, ticks by in anxious silence. Our hours are measured, but not meaningful. We live by the precision of the clock, yet our souls drift without rhythm. What once was sacred time — measured in prayer, in bells, in feast and fast — has become flattened into deadlines and alarms.
When the bells stopped ringing, something in the world grew quieter — and not for the better. The sound that once called both angels and men to attention has faded beneath the hum of engines and the buzz of notifications. But the Church still knows how to speak in time, and to make time speak of God.
To “own time” again would not mean domination, but consecration. It would mean teaching the world once more to hear the hours as holy — to remember that morning and evening belong to the Creator, that the midday sun still shines upon the Cross, and that night remains a vigil for the dawn of Resurrection.
Imagine if parishes tolled the Angelus again, if homes prayed Vespers at sunset, if we marked the hours not by meetings, but by the Eternal. The bells would not only keep time; they would redeem and sanctify — sounding across our restless age as a gentle proclamation:
Time belongs to God.
This will be the first in a series on time.
