Church of the Annoying 3:30AM Bells

The St Vincente Catholic Church is right next to our house in Bungtod, Bogo, Cebu, Philippines. Ask those close to me back in America how I feel about church in general, and you'll learn about my natural disdain for church. Then watch their bemused reactions when you tell them that I'm not living next to a Catholic church that has day-and-night services every day. I asked some locals why there are loud bells which create a great deal of commotion at about 3:30am every morning, and they informed me that this particular church does its thing  in the wee hours of the early morning and also in the afternoon, day in and day out.

Now I disagree with many of the fear and guilt tactics of Catholicism, I won't try to hide that. My dad was raised Catholic and my mom was raised Presbyterian, and when they got together they went with her side. Any time people here in the Philippines ask me which religion I am, I always have to describe Presbyterian because very few locals I've talked to are familiar with it. I usually just say that it's kind of like Catholic except that Presbyterians can eat meat on Fridays (most Filipinos who are Catholic don't worry about that Friday-no meat rule, by the way) and that also we typically only go to church on Sundays, without the mid-week mass. Sometimes I just simply reply that Presbyterian is basically the same as Catholicism but without all the fear and guilt.

That little gap between the ecorner entrance of the church and the little building, directly behind the school students walking, is the opening to the little dirt road which has my house on the left-hand side.

Being woken up in the wee hours each day by that cacophony of bells is annoying, I won't even try to sugarcoat that one. It drives me nuts. If they at least would only do that on Sundays and Wednesdays, it would not be so annoying. But come on, man.

But then again, I understand that in a relatively poor society, many people don't have much else to do besides go to church. Many of these people don't have TV, internet, etc. So it's actually kind of heartwarming to me to think that church, something which I've despised for as long as I can recall, can offer so much to these good people. The more time I spend here interacting with more and more locals, the less and less I'm annoyed by those bells. The bells of cacophony slowly morph into the bells of reason. And that makes me begin to wonder if church is really such a bad thing after all. Now if I could only begin to make peace with those roosters who live directly next to my kitchen window...