Seasons of Bells and Chains
Photo by Alisa Anton on Unsplash
Advent and Christmas are seasons of faith that summon us to pay attention. In US culture, we have easily and readily merged together the joy of Christmas and the beauty of winter and we seem to have no inclination to sort that out. These are times when it is good to smell, to take in all the aromas of baking and cooking. It is also a time to listen, because we are surrounded by many sounds of joy and beauty. A consequence of such joining together of Christmas and winter is that we can sing for the season:
Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way;
Oh, what fun it is to ride
in a one-horse open sleigh, hey;
Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way;
Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh.
Sleigh bells ring,
are you listenin’?
In the lane
snow is glistening;
a beautiful sight,
we’re happy tonight,
Walkin’ in a winter wonderland.
Both of these familiar songs feature bells linked to a sleigh ride. They are wonderful acts of nostalgia, mostly sung by people who have never been out in a one-horse open sleigh. We sing them and readily imagine the sound of the bells following the cadence of hoof beats from the one horse who easily pulls the imaginary sleigh. These are seasons for many bells. And if we tend to forget, the ubiquitous bells of the Salvation Army endlessly remind us that it is a season for generosity toward neighbors in need.
Not to be outdone, the church can also sing during the seasons of bells:
I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play;
And mild and sweet the songs repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men….
But the bells are ringing (peace on earth)
Like a choir singing (peace on earth)
Does anybody hear them? (Peace on earth)
Peace on earth good will to men.
Then rang the bells more loud and deep;
God is not dead, nor doth He sleep
(Peace on earth)
(Peace on earth)
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
with peace on earth good will to men.
The lines from Longfellow are a bit romantic and make their claim too easily. But the song does give substance to the bells; it is peace; it is peace on earth even while evil prospers and has its say. So we ring church bells with vigor and conviction, refusing to give in to circumstance. We may on every count exult in the happy bells that peal out God’s love for the world and God’s engagement with the world, with the keen prospect of wellbeing among neighbors. Let them ring!
But the season is not only for nostalgia and over-simplified frivolity. I suggest that the faithful, after we have heard the joyous bells, might listen more than once. What we may hear in our second and third and fourth listening might indeed be remote from our accustomed joy and beauty. I came to this awareness by reading some words by Frantz Fanon. He was born in 1925 in Martinique and became a surgeon. He decided early on to make his home and place of witness the nation states of northern Africa, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. While he had already fought with and for the French, he became a fierce and relentless voice against French colonialism and an active advocate for the independence of the northern African states. He was restless, insistent, and outspoken in his fearless work.
Given his good education, he undoubtedly knew of the dictum of Rousseau, “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” Fanon puts it this way:
If one listens with one ear glued to the red earth…one very distinctly hears the sound of rusty chains, groans of distress, and the bruised flesh is so constantly present in this stifling noonday that one’s shoulders droop with the weight of it. The Africa of every day, oh not poet’s Africa, the one that puts people to sleep, but the one that prevents sleep, for the people is impatient to do, to play, to speak. (Quoted by Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (2024) 285.)
Fanon devoted his fearless energy to the cause of independence for those subjugated nation states.
It strikes me as useful to juxtapose the glad bells of Christmas and the clanging chains of servitude. While the bells chant out a great hope, the chains narrate the sorry state of social reality in which some are despairingly subjugated while others enjoy the produce of their enslaved laborers. “The chains” provide an important, difficult counterpoint to “the bells.” But they also attest to us the cruel reality of raw human flesh rubbed sore every day by abuse, exploitation, and eventually despair.
My thought is that Advent/Christmas may be a time of double-hearing by the faithful, attentive to the bells of hope-filled celebration while at the same time responsive to the clanging chains of servitude. Our lives and our faith are situated in the both/and of bells and chains, and we are not free to simply choose one or the other in a way that covers over the profound ambiguity of our lives.
The economic story of humanity is one of surplus and deficit. Thus the clanging of chains bespeaks the true story of our long-running economy. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017), has traced this contested history through the production, accumulation, storage, and distribution of grain. Scott has seen how early on (and then continuing), powerful agents of wealth could readily store their wealth by accumulation of grain that was easy to store and to ship. The biblical account of Scott’s scenario is offered in the narrative account of Pharaoh’s grain monopoly wherein he monopolized grain and reduced the working peasants to powerless slaves:
Buy us and our land in exchange for food. We with our land will become slaves to Pharaoh; just give us seed, so that we may live and not die, and that the land not become desolate…You have saved our lives; may it please my lord, we will be slaves to Pharaoh (Genesis 47:19, 25).
Slavery is an indispensable reality in the accumulation of great wealth in the ancient world. As Moses nonetheless understood so well—and after him Rousseau and Fanon—such bondage did not and cannot snuff out the hope for an emancipated life in the world.
In our current practices of economic inequity, we embrace ownerships for some and manage to keep the disadvantaged hopelessly in debt and so available as cheap labor for menial tasks that most of us would not willingly perform. In my own town, the economic arrangement between the ownership class (of which I am a part) and the working class is such that working class wage earners are unable to afford property or housing. The clanging of chains is everywhere when we pay attention. I imagine that our best listening in Advent and Christmas is to hear both the bells that sound wellbeing, and the clanging of chains that tell the true story of an unjust public economy.
We do well in the Advent and Christmas seasons to keep the imagery and sounds of bells and chains before us. The bells of the season have such force among us to drive out the sound of the chains. But we know better. We know that carols and candles and generous gift giving do not override or veto the reality of the chains of exploitation, injustice, and enslavement. I have been astonished to scan our best known and best loved Christmas carols and to discover how little reference is made to our real life in the world. Indeed, one might conclude that our common love of carols is an effort of escapism into a hoped-for world that closes our eyes to the facts on the ground and that closes our ears to the clanging of chains that bespeak servitude. Our carols tend to push us toward a world other than the one we inhabit. In such a circumstance, it remains the counter-cultural work of faith in the church to insist that Christian practice pertains to the real world, not only peace (about which we love to sing), but to economic justice as well. As close as I could come to this accent in the carols (and I might have missed something) is the final verse of “Joy to the World”:
He rules the world with truth and grace,
and makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness,
and wonders of his love. (United Methodist Hymnal 246)
God’s rule, embodied in the baby at Bethlehem, concerns exactly “grace and truth.” Grace is the free gift of wellbeing and a viable life that is given without being earned. “Truth” is the assertion of God’s reliable governance that upholds the world and keeps it livable. I suspect that the antitheses to “grace and truth” are “merit and phoniness.” Merit, unlike grace, would appropriate all the good benefits of creation (and so of the economy) for those who earn it. “Phoniness” could be the seduction of pretense and posturing. We might conclude that the world of merit and phoniness is the world for which we strive and work and which we endlessly seek to embody. That world—in Christian tradition—is countered day-by-day by the practice of “grace and truth.” The early church saw in Jesus of Nazareth an embodiment of self-giving graciousness that did not depend on “performance.” That good governance of God, articulated and embodied in Jesus, counters a society of injustice and exploitation.
The practice of Christmas is not simply much bell ringing that echoes the goodness of God. The news is that God has heard the clanging of the chains of bondage and has moved against such bondage that we practice in day-to-day consumerism. We might do much better in accenting the restorative transformative intrusion that Christmas signifies. It is clear in the Gospel narrative that Jesus’ work is indeed restoration of lost, scarred, devalued lives, so much so that his restorative work alarmed the establishment that benefits greatly from present unjust socioeconomic arrangements. I can think of no more succinct assertion of this counter-reality than in the words of the Psalm:
Father of orphans and protector of widows
is God in his holy habitation.
God gives the desolate a home to live in;
he leads out the prisoner to prosperity,
but the rebellious live in a parched land (Psalm 68:5-6).
In biblical parlance “orphans and widows,” along with “sojourners” (immigrants), constitute the roster of the nameless who are endlessly at risk amid the rough and tumble economy of the empire. These verses attest that for orphans God, in a patriarchal society, is present as “a father,” the one who provides protection and livelihood. (In a different reading we might indeed name God as “the mother” who answers before we call in our time of need.) For “widows” in a patriarchal society God is the provider and protector who advocates for and assures wellbeing for the nameless. This God is the emancipator of the poor and those who lose their footing in a society because of the burden of unmanageable debt. Thus the God we celebrate in Christmas — the one birthed at Bethlehem — is indeed the dangerous transformer of the economy. This so that every member of the community (including the lowly shepherds) has the opportunity to share in the resources of the community. In our wondrous excess of music and celebration at Christmas, we in the church must take care that Christmas is not an escape from the real world. We of course are familiar with the prophetic trope lined out by Isaiah and Micah:
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks (Isaiah 2:4; Micah 4:3).
To this poetic couplet we might add a third element:
They shall hammer their chains into bells.
That hammering of chains into bells could silence the clanging chains of exploitation. But that hammering is not accomplished in the wish-world of worship. It happens in and through the sustained hard work of advocacy, testimony, and dispute. Since Moses issued his great imperative, “listen” (Deuteronomy 6:4), we people of faith have been summoned to listen. I suggest we might listen with both ears for the double sound of faith and reality, the bell of faith and the chains of reality. We are fully able to host both sounds at the same time, a task much more demanding than the simple ringing that happens all around us in this season. Imagine Moses, in his insistence, urging us
to listen,
to listen again, and then
to listen some more
until we hear both sounds at the same time.
When I had finished this reflection, it occurred to me to recall a hymn from my childhood. The first verse goes like this:
Faith of our fathers, living still,
in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword.
O how our hearts beat high with joy
whene’er we hear that glorious word. (“Faith of our Fathers,” United Methodist Hymnal 710).
This stanza imagines we had ancestors who held to their faith in the face of many maltreatments and abuses. The words suggest that even living in such “chains” they could still exult in the claims of the gospel. We may take care that our imagining is not an escape from the reality of the world. For that reason, we sing with our eyes open and our faith alert to the news of emancipation from bondage. It is in such insistence that we sing not only in hope, but in defiant resolve that segues into action.
