Clip of new bells for Notre Dame March 2013 stirs memory of bell-maker's son Boriska in the movie Andrei Rublev

New bells for Notre-Dame Cathedral

(To view video click on the line above that starts with "New bells for ...")

The bells of Notre-Dame will soon have a new ring. The cathedral has commissioned nine new bells to replace four 19th-century bells that have gone out of tune. The two largest new bells are being made at a foundry in northwestern France.

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Seeing this news clip reminded me of something my mentor and friend Gil Bailie wrote about, a great Russian movie tribute to the iconographer, Andrei Rublev. In the final chapter of the movie, titled "The Bell," Andrei has find himself at a turning point in his life when he arrives at a village where preparations are under way to replace the bell in the village church tower. The old bell-maker has died, and his unproven son, Boriska, has inherited the task of casting a new bell. “My father, the old snake,” Boriska complains, “didn’t pass on the secret. He died without telling me; he took it to the grave.” 

Rublev is hearing this lament from a young boy whose father had neglected his task – that of passing on the faith through his calling as the bell-maker for the church.  

In Rublev’s fifteenth century, the casting of a new church bell was an elaborate procedure with enormous challenges and considerable social anxiety. Rublev had abandoned icon writing and taken a vow of silence. He nevertheless saw his own vocational crisis mirrored in the young bell-makers’ dilemma. Rublev watched silently as the drama of the bell casting unfolded. Under the pressure of social expectations and uncertainties, the young Boriska supervised the digging of the pit, the selection of the clay, the shaping of the mold, the firing of the furnaces, the pouring of the molten bronze, and finally the hoisting of the bell into the tower. When the new bell rang perfectly at the consecration ceremony, Boriska collapsed in tears. Rublev cradled the boy in his arms and breaking his vow of silence, he said: “Let’s go together. You’ll cast bells. I’ll paint icons.”

ICON – The Holy Trinity

 When I meditate upon this icon – entering into the mystery represented in it, I often pause and reflect on Boriska’s complaint: “He died without telling me; he took it to the grave.” 

Gil wrote in one place: "This lament should haunt those of us who, though no merit of our own, have been the beneficiaries of Christian truth, a gift we received from the imperfect but nonetheless earnest hands of our predecessors in the faith. Were we to fail to pass on this faith to those who come after us, or if we pass on a lifeless replica of a once living faith, we will be as culpable as the old bell‐maker."

The film makes it perfectly clear that Christianity is not merely, and not primarily, a set of beliefs: it is a way of life, a participation in an ongoing historical drama of re-creation.  

"As the ancient hymn Veni Creator Spiritus says: “kindle the senses with light, infuse love into hearts.” If Pascal was right to say that faith moves, not from the mind to the heart, but from the heart to the mind, we might add that it enters the heart through the senses. 'You cast bells,' said Tarkovsky’s Rublev, 'and I’ll paint icons,' for these things play an important role in preparing us for an encounter with the Truth and thereafter in reminding us of our place in the drama of its historical outworking."