Let The Bells Ring Out

So a marketing guy walks into a bar, and the only other patron sitting there is a pastor. The two strike up a conversation and…

This sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? But it’s something even better: it’s a real-life history, wrapped in a mystery, that leads to the origin story of a unique nonprofit, and it’s followed up by a don’t-miss-it event for you, dear reader, at the beginning of the new year.

But let’s take things one at a time:

Paul Ashe was (and still is) the marketing guy, and his conversation in that Washington D.C. barroom a few years back was with the pastor of the Georgetown Lutheran Church. Their convo led to the revelation that the church was the home of the city’s oldest Lutheran congregation, founded seven years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence – and two solid decades before the District of Columbia was designated the nation’s capital.

But in recent years, Ashe learned, the church had developed a sad case of tintinnabulation deficit disorder.

That’s a fancy way of saying that the historic church’s old church bell had long been out of service. But way, way back, the bell had tolled through a near-mythical series of events – from its colonial provenance and through the American Revolution, to later embroilment in a Supreme Court case, then a disappearance perhaps associated with a Civil War debt and, at some point, a venture across state lines. Sometime during that eventful history, the bell developed a crack, which eventually rendered it un-ringable. So it was packed away and largely forgotten in a dusty storage closet at the church.

Ashe found the pastor’s tale to be, shall we say, appealing.

A discussion ensued about what it might take to repair the bell and restore it to a place of prominence within the church. The work was undertaken, and the timing of the restoration aligned with Georgetown Lutheran Church’s 2019 commemoration of its founding 250 years earlier.

This bell restoration was the inaugural project of a group led by Ashe that formed a nonprofit organization and, building on their success that very same year, went on to plan a citywide BellFest. As the National Bell Festival, they invited all of the belltowers in the District of Columbia to ring in the year 2020 on New Year’s Day. Folks bundled up in mufflers and mittens that day and turned out to drink hot cocoa and listen to the inimitable chiming of bells across the landscape – a sound once extolled as a  “gush of euphony” by 19th century writer Edgar Allan Poe in his enduring poem, “The Bells.”

The event was a literally resounding success, which inspired Ashe and the rest of the all-volunteer crew at the National Bell Festival to expand further. They commissioned more restorations of legacy and heritage bells across the country.

“So many bells have been falling silent,” Ashe said recently in an interview by phone. “This is a way to keep the bells ringing, but also bring back that community aspect.”

He was talking about the history of bells, and how across cultures and through time their uses could range from strictly functional, to musical, to spiritual. But whether cowbells or church bells, whether calling out warning or tolling the hour, whether mourning the dead, or celebrating the just-wed, or announcing the end of war, the ringing of bells has been woven into the human experience.

As Ashe once wrote in a piece for The Economist magazine, “Bells… give witness to the indefatigable human spirit.”

And so the National Bell Festival continues to expand its work, both conceptually and geographically.

Since 2021, the organization has engaged different visual artists to create an artwork that captures the spirit of the annual BellFest in some way.

And beginning in 2023, the National Bell Festival has spotlighted the campanological traditions of a different nation every year – not only to showcase the unique bell-making and bell-ringing culture of that country, but also to expand our appreciation for the diverse heritage we all share. In 2023, the focus was on the bells of Great Britain. This past year, the focus has been on the bells of Japan.

Coming up in 2025, the National Bell Festival will highlight the bells of Ukraine, which has suffered extensive losses of its cultural heritage, including bells, since the Russian invasion. Ukrainian cut-paper artist Natalia Didenko will serve as the Official Festival Artist.

To further commemorate the toll that the war has had on Ukraine’s culture, the National Bell Festival has commissioned a Solidarity Bell that will be debuted in 2025. This has been a “bullet shell-to-bell” project. Along the lines of turning swords into plowshares, the materials for the bell have been sourced from the munitions and ordnance that Russia has inflicted upon Ukraine.

Using a similar approach for another bell commission, the National Bell Festival worked with community partners over several months earlier this year to clean up the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers that flow through Washington D.C. neighborhoods. From the trash hauled out of the river, they culled out any usable metal debris – there were bullet casings, bedframes, doorknobs, and keys – enough to melt down and create a 150-pound new bell. The Litter Bell is being installed at the entrance to the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, which is also the home for the Center for Environmental Justice. The bell will receive its official unveiling and be rung for the first time on January 1, 2025 at 11 AM Eastern time.

Then on January 1 at 2 PM Eastern, the National Bell Festival encourages people across the United States to participate in a simultaneous bell-ringing that will resonate across the nation. (This means it will happen at 1 PM Central, 12 PM Mountain, 11 AM Pacific, 10 AM Alaska, and 9 AM Hawaii/Aleutian time.) Everyone is invited to participate, with whatever bells are at your disposal: hand bells, church bells, fire bells, memorial bells, carillons, memorial chimes, and so on. The Festival folks recommend 20 minutes of ringing (“or as long as it is comfortable for you to pull the rope!”) It’s an opportunity to come together as diverse individuals and work together as communities create a “canopy of sound” across the nation.

Ashe noted that bells actually resounded on all seven continents last year to ring out the old and chime in the new.

“Bells don’t care about a border or wealth,” he said. “They connect us to home. They unite humanity.”

To learn about more upcoming bell-ringing events, visit www.bells.org/event/nationwide-bell-ringing

Barbara Lloyd McMichael is a freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest.