Beautiful Old Broads listen to bells

Hello Dear Ones,

While reading Thomas Cahill’s latest insightful piece of history, “Heroes and Heretics”, I stumbled on a jewel almost at the end of the book when Cahill mentions John Donne.  Donne was a poet and later in his most colorful life, an Anglican priest.  Cahill states that his sermons were dazzling and so I thought I’d share this famous meditation on death preached by Donne when he was Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.  Most appropriate for Good Friday.

“Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.  Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him.  And perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.  The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all.  When she baptizes a child; that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingraffed into that body, whereof I am a member.  And when she buries a man, that action concerns me.  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.  God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness…The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.  Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises?  But who takes off his eye from a comet, when that breaks out?  Who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings?  But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?  No man is an island, entire of itself: every man 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 thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

                                                it tolls for thee.”