Where In Montville: Big Bell

Does this photo ring any bells? If so, chime in. Tell us in the comments Where In Montville we took this photo, or pretty much any interesting or amusing thing you want, and you could win a shout-out when we post the answer on Friday.

We didn't plan this or anything, but (as you can see by the bulletin at the top of the page about and being closed) Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and our featured photo is of a bell.

King sometimes cited a John Donne passage featuring church bells, and he did so in his last Sunday sermon, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," given at the National Cathedral in the days before his assassination.

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.

John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." And he goes on toward the end to say, "Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution.