Does your faith ring a bell? The sound of church bells has the power to transport us to grace. (practicing catholic).

WE ROUNDED THE HAIRPIN TURN ALONG the footpath above the Italian hill town. The sunlit farmland below was as luminous as a stained-glass window. Cypress trees doused the air with the fragrance of holiness. My husband began singing an aria, and the echo was a choir. A butterfly's yellow wings flickered like the flame of a votive candle. But none of this prepared me for the sacred moment I experienced as we reached the top: the ringing of church bells.

I knew not the pitch nor the melody nor the rhythm. I only knew that they rang for me and anyone like me who needed an awakening of faith, to hear the sound of the Holy Spirit being poured out from on high. It was then I realized that if anything could stop my day in its tracks and summon me to pause for prayer, it was a bell. A church bell. Not the door bell or telephone ringing. Not the alarm clock or oven timer. Not the computer or fax or any mundane noises that reminds me I am of this world. Only a delicate, high-pitched sound from the heavens could transport me to a moment of grace.

When I returned to the States, not only was I eager to read The Hunchback of Notre Dame and For Whom the Bell Tolls and watch the Hitchcock film Vertigo, with its dramatic mission bell-tower scene, but I was even more determined to listen for church bells in my Brooklyn neighborhood. Perhaps they were ringing and I just didn't hear them.

My own parish doesn't have a bell tower, though with modern technology there is no need for a tower, a ringer, or even a bell for that matter. There are companies that install a speaker system on a rooftop as easily as a satellite dish.

I went to Mass at a church down the street with a bell tower and bell. Rumor had it that the priest saying Mass rings it. Oh, did I have visions of climbing the ladder to the belfry one rung below him--so close to the bell that I could have tugged the rope myself. Seems the church did have a mechanized carillon, but it broke down years ago. I heard about yet another Catholic church nearby that has a working carillon on a timer. The following Sunday I went to Mass thinking this was going to be the glorious day. I would ignore matters of timbre and tuning, which was no effort at all since I'm practically tone-deaf. I wouldn't care how crude the bell, how uneven the quality, how limited the range, just so it rang. And it did.

Then I began to wonder why more church bells weren't ringing. After all, we're not early Christians in Rome who must worship in secret or fear persecution by the state. Church bells have been a public voice ringing as a call to divine worship since the fourth century, according to some sources. Hand bells and then larger tower bells were rung to indicate the eight canonical periods of prayer and devotion in monasteries. The bigger the better, so farmers out in the fields could hear them. In fact, some were so heavy, apparently it took more than 50 men to ring them. In the Dark Ages, they were a symbol of hope and progress. Later the clash of several bells ringing at once signified joyous feasts and eventually different bells were used for different reasons, be it to announce the type of service and sermon preached or as a reminder to fast.

According to a Brooklyn diocese spokesperson, there are church bells in disrepair all over the borough--and country no doubt--and little funding to fix them. I was inspired to learn that didn't stop a church in Brooklyn from asking phone company volunteers to restore theirs. And to ward off complaints from neighbors who somehow associate them with urban noise, they moderated the volume and don't ring them for early-morning Mass.

Some say that bell ringing is making a comeback these days. Those trying to revive it are, in their own way, continuing the work of Aaron in the Old Testament who wore gold bells along with colored tassels in the form of pomegranates on the hem of his robe when he entered the temple. Though it was easier to listen for it on an Italian hillside because the bell's celestial ring reflected the pastoral setting, I find a wake-up call all the more uplifting in the manic pace of a big city. Maybe because I have a farther climb up.

By PAOLA CORSO, fiction writer instructor at Fordham University in New York City, New York.