The bells were tolling last night as I walked to class past the old stone buildings through a cool and soggy evening.
I thought about a passage from Thomas Cahill's Mysteries of the Middle Ages, which details a 1219 visit between Saint Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil of Egypt, Palestine and Syria.
Some scholars think that it was then that Francis came up with the idea of tolling the Angelus bells at 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m. — the Christian version of the Muslim call to prayer. A likely story, and maybe just that, a story. But it was easy to believe it when the bells were ringing.