Morning Thanks--Comayagua church bells

The Cathedral in downtown Comayagua, the heart of the city, had a multi-million dollar face lift not so long ago, undertaken to return the old edifice to what people believe it looked like when it was built in 1636. 

You read that right--1636. Today, the Church of Mercy may well be the most significant colonial monument in Comayagua, Honduras, the country's very first capitol. 

Its ancient clock--a Moor clock--still rings out the time every fifteen minutes, as it has since 1636. Get this--back then the clock was already 500 years old. Comayagua got it as a gift from Phillip II of Spain, when Honduras was a Spanish colony. It's old age, people say, is written on its face: the four is IIII, not IV, which, I'm told, is a much more modern form of Roman numeral. 

Pigeons love the place, but then so do tourists because for a buck, if you're skinny enough, you can climb the well-worn cement steps all the way to the top of the belfry and not only look out on the city and the Honduran countryside, but also see, up close and personal, the assembly that keeps time in Comayagua, a mechanism created by Moors in the 12th century. Like I said, that clock was 500 years old when Phillip II gave it to the city in 1636. 

What that old clock trips, of course, is the bells, none of which were built yesterday either, as is obvious, up close and personal. 

It's impossible, really, to imagine yourself in a time and place so far removed from this distance, from the small town on the edge of the American Great Plains where we live, almost 400 years later, or, even more of a stretch, eight long centuries before some able Islamic workmen set together the mechanism of a clock that, even today, still sends out timely beauty to an old city Honduran city.

But I couldn't help thinking about the tower and the church and that old town when reading Olivia Hawker's The Ragged Edge of Night, a novel set in rural Germany in 1943 among men and women who have come to believe that what der Fuhrer is doing is in every possible way despicable, in their words, sin. 

Anton Starzman is an ex-friar plagued by guilt that has accrued from what he didn't do to protect children once in his care. Anton meets a local priest, who operates in the German resistance. When the two of them take their first treacherous steps toward opening up, Father Emil tells Anton of the level of doubt, not faith, a man of the cloth can have--and he has. He tells the story of his own failure. 

"Emil," Anton says, "how can you continue to lead a congregation?" 

Father Emil points at the bells in the church he serves. Just then, just as every fifteen minutes, the bells ring out. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Father Emil says. “The bells. They’ve hung in that tower for hundreds of years; imagine the things they have seen, the worlds they have known. When my thoughts are at their darkest, I listen to the bells and I remember that Germany hasn’t always been what it is now. Those bells remember it—the way we were before.” Father Emil is fully capable of irony. “I know I sound like a fool," he says, "—perhaps I am one. They are only bells, yet I can’t help but think of them as something more. . .Every time I hear them, I hear the past singing, too. I can’t help but remember all the people who came before."

But Anton reminds Father Emil of what it was that raised that inescapable doubt in his soul. 

But Father Emil says he's learned to live it. “I took each day as it came. I still do—what else can any man do? I can’t worry about what might happen in the future; I can only tend to my small flock here and now, today, hour by hour, and pray that what I do is what God wills. . .Trust that everything is in God’s hands.”

The Honduran gentleman at far right is our Cathedral guide, the man who took our dollars. The woman beside him is Barbara, who loved all that ancient mechanism. I took the picture, making sure to get that can of WD-40 down in the corner, a kind of joke really. 

The truth is, I liked the place--being up there, the ancient clock and bells, the can of WD-40 and the cardboard stuck in the corner to keep the pigeons from nesting; but not until I was back home again, not until I read a passage in a novel did the upper-room museum come alive. 

So this morning I'm thankful for having squeezed my ample body up that skinny staircase to see all the history gathered above the city, I'm even more thankful for seeing it today in light of the confession of a Catholic priest in rural Germany in a novel set in the darkness of the Third Reich, a man who trusts in God by way of old church bells in what otherwise would be silent agony all around. 

It was a priest in a novel that made the place come alive.