for_whom

The Renaissance (seventeenth-century) poet John Donne did not plan for a life in the ministry. He became a priest in the Church of England only after being driven out of the law courts and deprived of a career in the legal profession by a furious father-in-law, the result of an indiscretion that can be clearly heard in several of his early poems. Donne procrastinated for several years before finally leaving civil employment and taking holy orders, however the year after he was appointed to his first parish disaster struck. His wife Anne died suddenly leaving him with seven children to raise on his own and then spots began to appear on his own body. He was diagnosed with the dreaded plague and retreated to a lonely room, there confining himself to bed and waiting to die.

As he lay on his sick bed, day after day, Donne began to keep a journal with what little strength he had left. One still dawn the sound of church bells pealing broke the early morning peace. Donne listened through his open bedroom windows, wondering if one of his friends, thinking his condition more grave than it was, had ordered the bells to be rung for him, announcing his death ahead of time. As he continued to listen, however, it became apparent that the church bells were ringing for someone else, a neighbor who had died that morning of the plague. Donne continued to reflect on the pealing of the bells and his own initial thoughts all that morning and then began to write in his journal what would become known as Devotion XVII - On the Church Bells.

The words that flowed from his pen that morning are among some of the greatest and most memorable in the English language -

"The Church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions,
all that she does belongs to all.
When she baptises a child, that action concerns me;
for that child is thereby... in-grafted into that body whereof I am a member.
And when she buries a man, that action concerns me;
all mankind is of one author.
No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
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."

What John Donne had learned and come to realise that morning was that the church bells that for one man marked the end of life, for him sounded a question mark, asking Was he ready to meet his God? This sparked a renewal in his way of thinking about and viewing and understanding the world.

The periods during which he had suffered the most, Donne realised in retrospect, had also been the times of the greatest spiritual growth. Growing up in poverty had taught him dependence on God and the generosity of others together with a disdain for worldly good and possessions. Public shame and disgrace had taught him humility and to renounce those temptations which led only to damaging himself and others. And what was he learning now through the course of this illness? Although he was weak and powerless in a physical sense, that was not necessarily the case spiritually. Donne began to channel his energies into the spiritual disciplines, into a life of prayer, confession, meditation, and the keeping of his journal, finding strength he did not know he had deep within his being.

The stark, and eminently true, realisation that the bell had tolled that morning every bit as much for him as it had for his less fortunate neighbor turned his thoughts away from himself and his own situation toward others. In time, Donne’s illness turned out to be a form of typhus and not the dreaded plague, and he was to make a full recovery. But John Donne did not know that as he wrote those immortal lines - words that continue today to remind us of the intertwining of our lives with others and of the reality that authentic existence can only ever be existence with and for others.