The various Lives of Ciarán of Saighir share varying degrees of detail and information, but one thing I feel fairly certain about is that Ciarán’s bell was very small.

In his time, it would have been relatively easy to keep it handy and wait for its announcement that you have found the Place You Were Meant to Be.

So small, it would have been easy to lose.

These days, our own bells have to compete with modern equivalents. And the former are terribly overmatched.

Modern life moves a million miles a second. We’ve found a way to completely deprive ourselves of the stillness and quiet we need to properly assess any present moment. When I think about this, I’m often reminded of the Ents, and Merry and Pippin’s impatience with Treebeard. We think that scene is funny because Treebeard talks so slowly. The joke, however, is on us. Sit yourself down underneath an old-growth oak or maple and wait for it to speak and you’ll see what I mean. Theirs is the proper pacing.

In addition to the bell, I also think about the foundation Ciarán was laying. Ciarán likely didn’t complete any feasibility studies, go through public facilities ordinances or submit any application to a planning board. He went where God sent him and enlisted the help of animals. Aside from the concrete, this lays a very different kind of spiritual and communal foundation that today I think would be very hard to replicate.

These stories are sometimes depressing to me, in a way. I wonder the extent to which we’re even capable of navigating the world in this way. To do so would do us a world of good, but our pocket rectangles have done wonders for our myopia and solipsism.

At the same time, though, I’m reminded of what Ciarán and his contemporaries did to combat their own distractions. They didn’t live in the monastery, nor did they live in the forest. For them, proper living involved a back-and-forth tension between Severance and Return, never staying too long in one or the other. That’s something I think we can all manage to practice.

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