Article
Awe and wonder
Change
Community
Time
7 min read

The bells that awaken awe in the new year

We need new rhythms if we are to navigate the world as it is today.

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Restored church bells lined up in a cathedral, as crowds mill around them.
Notre Dame bells.
Notre Dame de Paris.

The jackdaws flap and caw as they come in to roost. The sun sets behind the bare trees; its fiery farewell doing nothing to warm the cold air. The village church bell rings out 4pm. My young daughter stops what she is doing, says “ding dong”, then carries on. That’s what we all used to do: stop what we were doing and be called to something else, the bell’s rhythmic tolls cutting through our individuality and unifying us for a time. Perhaps we would go to church, or stop to pray, or remember the dead for whom the bell tolled. I have been thinking about that often-quoted poem by John Donne:  

No man is an island, 

Entire of itself. 

Each is a piece of the continent, 

A part of the main. 

If a clod be washed away by the sea, 

Europe is the less. 

As well as if a promontory were. 

As well as if a manor of thine own 

Or of thine friend's were. 

Each man's death diminishes me, 

For I am involved in mankind. 

Therefore, send not to know 

For whom the bell tolls, 

It tolls for thee. 

Now, church bells ring out the hours of the clock, and occasionally still ring out mourning and celebration too. They seem also to ring out a quaintness, a nostalgia, a past that is slipping away. I have been sitting by the old stone church listening to them, wondering what else they might be tolling for, what else might be slipping away. In Donne’s poem, he says the bell tolls not for them, but for us, because we are all connected. Each person’s death diminishes the whole from which they were a part, and so diminishes me. The bells used to remind us of that whole.  

The bell could be melancholy but I notice how it tilts me toward hope, even in this deep winter stillness; an audible distillation of light ringing through the dimness. I think it is the hope of mankind which Donne tells me I am involved in. These old bells seem to ring defiantly despite the many other chimes that ring just for me: digital pings, messages, notifications, news, an algorithm that tried to force me down my own lone path. But echoes of communal life persist. Now, I hear the bell say:  

Ding: listen 

Dong: lift your head 

Ding: look  

Dong: life is a whole  

Ding: face each other  

Dong: this is the only way we will meet the future 

A few days later, my daughter and I step into the village hall. We surface together from evening darkness into the light of song: it is the carol concert, we are late, and the music is about to start. The singers are decked in lights and earthy greens and rusty reds. They are a group from Exmoor who conserve and share traditional and local songs, as well as singing the songs we all recognise. My daughter’s cheeks are pink, her eyes blaze with delight. In a few days, the solstice will be here, and the earth will pause in its movement before turning back to face the light. Here in this old hall, the songs seem to reach towards that coming light: we are here, we are together, and we choose to lift our individual voices as one chorus of community.  

I think about the people in this hall gathering to mark other things — memories, celebrations, vision, care — and I wonder about the more figurative bells that draw them together to do so. What are the bells that keep us together now, when so much encourages us into isolation and individualism? — The bells that remind us we can never be the islands that we are so often encouraged to be: independent, tough, believing consumption will heal us, packaged into a personal brand; everything encouraging us to be seen, not known.  

I try to listen for these bells, to hear how to inhabit time reverently and with reciprocity, not with urgency and isolation. In many places the actual church bells are silent, but I think we still need the bells of communality: bells that call us into share rhythms, reminding us to pause in our individual movement, reminding us to gather, to mourn, to remember things and find the light and the hope in each other, just as the tilting of the earth pauses at the solstice before it turns to face the light.  

Nature’s cycle is one way of doing this: tuning in to the turn of the year that makes new life possible. The solstice and equinox; wassailing in January to bless the apple trees; noticing when migrating birds appear or leave; sharing planting and harvesting days. Liturgical calendars are a way that Christian communities kept and still keep time: advent, Christmas, lent, Easter. These rhythms become familiar, reminding us that time isn’t linear, much as the myth of infinite progress would have us believe otherwise. Time is cyclical, expanding and contracting; old events revisited regularly in new ways.  

Knowing that it is not just me looking at these stars, but people across the world and through time, brings me into a peace, a reverence that can be hard to come by.

And there are other things that can bring us together too: causes, hobbies, interests, protests. These can take on the role of bells perhaps, drawing us together around shared purpose – but shared purpose and shared existence, shared being, are not always the same thing.  

Perhaps we need new rhythms if we are to meet the world as it is today. Imagine if a bell tolled — literally or figuratively — not just for human funerals, but whenever a species went extinct, or a tree cut down. Imagine if neighbourhoods gathered to light candles and share stories and soul and care each week, offering a space that church used to provide to lots of people through the ages. And what if we resurrected old traditions for a new age: ‘beating the bounds’ as a way to mark not just the boundaries of land but the places that need restoring and regenerating now; harvest festivals not just as something for school children and rural churches, but as a way we can better connect with food and farming. What if we looked at old wisdom; the way the church calendar aligned with the farming calendar, asking us to remember that food and the soil it comes from are sacred things.  

Our friends were near the beach in Costa Rica. They noticed that at the end of the day, everyone stopped what they were doing — fishing, fixing, working — and watched the sunset. This moment of beauty seemed to bring people together into synchronicity. In his book Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, scientist Dacher Keltner shows us how experiencing awe can, amongst other things, help us to experience humanity, see patterns in life, and better collaborate with each other. He says: “The last pillar of the default self—striving for competitive advantage, registered in a stinginess toward giving away possessions and time—crumbles during awe. Awe awakens the better angels of our nature.” Perhaps putting ourselves in the way of awe might help us hear the bells — old and new — that ring in this current age, and that might bring us together and love each other well. If love only exists in relationship, and love is what helps us to see and to care, then protecting and restoring relationship seems to be vital work for our time.   

Now, the winter sky is dark and the stars shine brightly above. They shine with a clarity that matches the peal of the bells in the village. They call me beyond myself into something unified, something older, something necessary. They call me into wonder and awe. Knowing that it is not just me looking at these stars, but people across the world and through time, brings me into a peace, a reverence that can be hard to come by. I step back into the house but my mind faces outwards into the world.  

Church bells used to call people together to worship, bringing a sense of shared time and purpose. They still ring, but they can be hard to hear against the noise of individual time. I think they are calling us together again now. And if we can’t hear them, perhaps we need to set new bells ringing. May the bells that ring this New Year’s Day inspire us to do so. 

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Article
Change
Politics
7 min read

Hope is a choice, insist on it

Amid loveless politics, remember hope cannot exist in isolation.

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A crowd of people stand in the side steps of the Lincoln Memorial
Easter services, Lincoln Memorial.

The other day – a cold grey day, the kind of day that makes summer seem as distant as a star – I encountered a woman who stood out. She was cheerful despite everyone else’s winter gloom, and she was wearing a home-made tabard. The tabard was covered in a layer that seemed to be made of tape and clingfilm, and underneath it were little Ukrainian flags, images, facts, and small everyday items like soap. I have seen her before dressed the same way. She stood out, I think, because of her attire but also because of the defiance she radiated – a defiant joy, but also belief that it is worth hoping and acting in the ways we can, even when all the evidence seems to tell us those actions make no difference. The news of Russian’s invasion on Ukraine in 2022 has lost its initial shock power. We are creatures who like stories, and so we like news that has a clear beginning or end. The messy middle can be hard to stick with, precisely because we do not know what comes next or how long it lasts. And so our attention moves on. This, coupled with our felt powerlessness in something so big and distant, can mean it is easy to lose hope, to stop taking action.  

But the woman who raises awareness most days in this creative way, with suggestions for what items to donate or how to send funds or how to host refugees, has been making me re-look at hope. Her posture – her insistence on hope as choice – feels life-affirming and countercultural. For a moment, she snaps me out of despair for the world. She faces looks of bemusement and seems to say, if not this, then what?  

What keeps us moving forward when the world seems heavy? Where does hope spring from, even in the face of overwhelming odds? Hope, I have learned, has been tangled with humans for as long as we’ve walked the earth. It ensured the survival of our ancestors because it drew them towards a future that might be better than today. It kept them going.  

In Greek mythology, Pandora opened a box out of curiosity despite being told not to. All kind of curses contained in the box spilled out into the earth. She wrestled the lid back on but not until it was almost too late. Almost, but not entirely. One thing remained in the box: hope. This myth always brings to my mind memories of visiting a slave fort that still stands on the coast in Ghana. The walls were oppressive, the words above the gate that led to the slave ships were haunting: ‘door of no return’. And yet I learned that there were songs. Spirituals and other songs that passed the time, helped members of different tribes feel connected when they were all shoved together, and conjured hope despite all the evidence to the contrary.  

Optimism asks us to sit back and hope for the best; hope knows that we have work to do to bring forth a better future. 

Ideas of hope have been with us always. And yet I find that hope can feel hard to conjure now, staring into the face of an increasingly unknowable and uncertain future:  authoritarian leadership that seems to be on the ascendancy, impacts of the climate crisis that are coming into startling clarity, and loneliness that has been declared a global health concern by the World Health Organisation. It is easy to feel that things are falling apart. Faced with these things and more, hope can seem naive, wishful, hard to get hold of.   

Perhaps one reason for this is that hope, in the age of the individual, is harder to come by because hope is relational, it cannot exist in isolation. It is transmitted through community, story, and care for others. Those old slave songs sang of hope because, I imagine, people had the reality or memory of each other. Hope said: people have been good, and they will be good again. Hope is insistently communal. It asks us not to bear the weight of the world on our own, but to face each other and distribute that weight via a web of relationship. Perhaps now, accessing a hope that can carry our burdens and our fears means first re-finding each other.   

Hope and blind optimism are, of course, different things. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said that “Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better.” Optimism asks us to sit back and hope for the best; hope knows that we have work to do to bring forth a better future. And so perhaps that’s why lately, hope has felt exhausting. I’ve worked with communities internationally and locally for two decades on all kinds of projects, always asking, is this how things have to be? How might we imagine and build better? And yet still the climate worsens, inequality persists, bad leaders get into positions of terrifying power. It is easy to stand back and despair, to question, to wonder if all the hard work has been in vain.  

Jesus knew this exhaustion. He knew what it was to work, encourage, and love hard, often to face rejection, mockery, and ultimately death. But still Jesus chose to enter into the persistent mess of the world. He chose the day in, day out work of becoming flesh. He affirmed the dignity of the marginalised, calling them into action, knowing that action would keep that dignity alive. He knew that new life would come through suffering, not by denying it.  

 

Strongman authoritarian leaders aren’t the problem, they are a symptom of a society who are divided and not encountering each other well 

Perhaps hope is hard too because though it is a posture which faces the future, it also asks that we live with integrity, love, and care right now, in this fractured world. Hope is not writing off the present in favour of some distant time or place. It is not wishing this world away so that we hasten to another one. It says, we can work for a better future, but we should not put off good work until then. That better future will only come if we invite it into our present, whatever the outcome might be. Hope is in living deep and timeless and world building values, even if there are no obvious or immediate results. Czech playwright and former dissident Vaclav Havel who led his nation after the collapse of communism said that

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

If a principle is right for the future, it is right for now, even if that requires work. If I espouse values of kindness, love, community, and imagine a future where these things rule, and yet ignore the marginalised, or distrust people not like me, or cut off people I don’t agree with, then my hope for the future is no more than optimism, because I am not willing to do the difficult work of living as if that future were here now.   

Hope is turning outwards and living these values with others, even when honestly sometimes it seems easier and more appealing to turn inwards and single-handedly try and fix things — a myth that has grown in our age of individualism, celebrity, and our self-referential rhythms of life.   

Hope has lately been asking me to take a Beatitudes perspective on things. In his Beatitudes, Jesus flipped the logic of the world on its head. The last will be first, the poor will inherit the kingdom, the weeping will find joy. Like the Beatitudes, hope asks me to take a different approach. When I look at the world through this lens I find new ways to think. Perhaps, for example, things aren’t getting worse but instead are becoming clear, truths are being unveiled – and so climate change is not the problem, rather, it is a symptom of a greedy economic system in which we are all complicit; Strongman authoritarian leaders aren’t the problem, they are a symptom of a society who are divided and not encountering each other well, and of money and distrust having too big a say in how we govern ourselves. This doesn’t mean we should stop addressing the symptoms, but that we have new possibilities in our scope for action.  

Now, as we enter another cycle of — at best — strange politics that is steeped in lovelessness and will have unknowable outcomes near and far, the thing I search for alongside wise voices is hope. And searching for hope means living a good future now, and finding others who can carry both despair and beauty with me. Novelist and critic John Berger said that

“Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.”  

So let us call on that energy, that light in the dark today. It is how we build the future.  

Join us Behind the Seen

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If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

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