Silver Bells

In Silver Bells, Bing Crosby and Carol Richards crooned of the silver bells that mark the arrival of Christmas in the city. It’s a great song, reminiscent of the days when downtown streets across America were filled with holiday shoppers, long before they began their mass exodus to the malls, the big box stores, and on-line specials.
While I enjoy hearing Silver Bells, one of my first piano selections, the Christmas bells I hear most often tend to be more functional in nature, as they’re found clanging rhythmically in search of funds to fill the Salvation Army kettle. The sound of the bell at the kettle can get annoying, as hour after hour it demands to be heard, and some merchants have forbidden the sound of those bells. Yet they faithfully ring on across the country, as much a part of American Christmas tradition as red-nosed Rudolph and the Christmas-stealing Grinch.

I was seduced by the sound of ringing bells at the age of fifteen, and I've spent forty-plus years in a love/hate relationship with their insistent tones. I've rung this bell in the snow of Western New York, in the shadow of Grand Central Station, and with my toddler at my side in New Jersey. It's followed me to Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Canton, and even turned up in our newest home in Ashland, Ohio, side-by-side with the Amish buggies and cow-tipping teens. I love this bell because it's insistent, forever calling attention to those on the margins. I hate it because it only wants to be held when the weather is cold, windy and wet.

I’ve looked at the kettle bell as a necessary evil, one that generates funding for Salvation Army mission, but I also hear another level of insistence in those bells: don’t forget. Don’t forget the poor, the outcast, the oppressed.  They are among you, rings the bell, your brothers and sisters.  They must not be lost in the shuffle of holiday spending. 

It is Luke who records the first public words of Jesus, heard in Nazareth’s synagogue, as he quotes Isaiah’s prophecy:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18).

From the poverty of his birth to the abandonment of his death, Jesus heard the voice of the poor. In communities like mine, they don’t sleep on the steps of city hall, but they live here, struggling from day to day. “Don’t forget,” rings the bell.  “In as much as you have done it unto the least of these . . .”

From Christmas Memories: Reflections of a Smitten Believer