Several times throughout the day, the bells from the Camaldolese monastery on the hill rang out across the fields where I worked. The sound was almost mystical, especially in the morning, when the mist rose from the lake and valleys. It was like hearing a call from another world. Whatever I was doing, whether polishing a saddle or fixing a gate, the monastery bells were my signal to pause and pray the Angelus.
I was 18 that summer. My decision to take my faith more seriously had landed me in a summer job training horses at a Catholic retreat center. To me, Catholicism felt intellectually and culturally significant, the religion of monks and cathedrals, towering intellects like Aquinas, reformers like Francis of Assisi or Teresa of Ávila, poets like Chaucer and Dante. I knew the church would make demands of me, and I was ready for it, or thought I was. Maybe I, too, would be an important theologian or a reformer. Maybe I’d even be martyred.
These fantasies about my faith were melodramatic and tinged with egotism. I could have used a primer on the gospel’s social dimension, but what I got at my new workplace was pretty much the opposite.
There were no cathedrals, but there was a giant repurposed warehouse used for Mass and youth groups. There were no monks or nuns, but there were communities of consecrated men and women whose lives were governed by rigidly enforced rules—especially for the women. When I tried to talk with the staff theologian about Catholic philosophy, he fell back on rules and definitions.
Because I was working there full time, I had to live in the community and abide by its rules. This meant rising at five every morning, eating a simple breakfast, and convening in the chapel for two hours of silent prayer, followed by Mass. Then we dispersed to our various duties.
What a relief to exit the stuffy chapel and hike up to the barn in the fresh morning air to work with my hands and spend time with horses.
The monastery on the hill was not connected with the retreat center. The monks lived cloistered lives, and I never saw them; the monastery remained a realm of mystery and, as such, an outpost of the church I was seeking. So, when I heard its bells, I was happy to pause and say the Angelus, a prayer that connected me with that mystery, that other world.
The practice of praying the Angelus is rooted in monastic life and likely arose from the tradition of reciting three Hail Marys at the sound of the bell announcing compline—the final prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours. Traditionally, the Angelus is prayed three times a day, in response to the morning, noon, and evening bells. The core of the prayer is simple: just three Hail Marys interspersed with short responses taken from the dialogue between Mary and the angel in the gospel account of the annunciation:
The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary / And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.
Behold the handmaid of the Lord / Be it done to me according to thy word.
And the Word was made flesh / And dwelt among us.
Other prayers have been added over the years, but that’s the essence of the Angelus. Its purpose is to honor the incarnation.
The prayer seemed especially fitting for farm labor because of my father’s favorite painting, French artist Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus, which depicts two peasants standing in the evening light at the end of the workday, heads bowed in prayer, a basket of newly harvested potatoes between them. Millet said the painting was inspired by his grandmother, who, when she heard the church bells, would stop work and pray for the dead.
The painting was emblematic of the life my father wanted: simple community on the land inspired by the Benedictine ideal of ora et labora, prayer and work.
What strikes me now about the painting, and about the Angelus, is that the summons to pray meant a break from labor. Catholic Europe was hardly a workers’ paradise, yet laborers got days off for many feast days, not just to attend Mass but to rest or celebrate. The tradition of pausing in the workday to say a prayer captures this rhythm of liturgical life in miniature.
Today, liturgical living is practically a brand, and it carries a whiff of privilege, all expensive beeswax candles and bespoke altar linens. Yet the peasants in Millet’s painting were not influencers propping up their basket of potatoes as part of a staged set. They were workers grateful for the opportunity for a break. Today’s iteration of Millet’s peasants might be migrant farm laborers or urban ironworkers. They might be restaurant workers stepping outside for a smoke break or even adjunct instructors sleeping in their cars.
In honoring the incarnation, the Angelus prayer honors the Christian teaching that God became human. But we can’t leave out that God explicitly became human in the world of the downtrodden—became a worker, one of those who labor and carry heavy burdens. It doesn’t seem possible to honor this belief if we only honor it halfway, thinking of the body of Christ as something pristine and abstracted from the hard, gritty life into which Jesus was born.
When the church shows up in the lives of workers today, does it still honor God’s incarnation into their struggle? Does it extend that grace of offering respite from burdens? True liturgical living would be, not just aesthetics, but a rhythm of life that allows for rest and celebration. The tradition of the Angelus prayer, like the medieval feasts, disrupts the assumptions of our late-stage capitalist culture, where everything has a price tag—even spirituality.
There’s no monastery on the hills near where I live now, and I don’t get to hear bells while I am working in my gardens. Even if I did, I’m not sure I’d pray the exact Angelus prayer. But over the years I’ve held onto that tradition of pausing in my outdoor labor for a moment of contemplation.
Sometimes I look around at the other living things with which I share this Earth and consider the connections and interdependencies between them. The bees pollinate flowers while collecting their food. The monarch butterflies, rarer than they used to be, seek the milkweed we leave growing along fence lines.
Not all those connections are peaceful. Nature was filled with terrors even before humans came along to subjugate other species and one another. The parasitic braconid wasp, for instance, lays eggs inside the body of the hawk moth larva or tomato horn worm. The wasp larva hatch and eat their way out of the caterpillar, spinning cocoons that attach to its skin. Beneficial for tomato gardeners, sure, and an intrinsic part of ecological balance. Not so pleasant for the horn worm.
The biblical “peaceable kingdom” offers a vision of nature with all its beauty and bounty, none of its violence. In the kingdom of heaven, there are no kings and peasants, masters and slaves. Even the animals live alongside one another equitably and peacefully. If the Angelus bells are the promise of another world, it is that kingdom, not our violent empires, that is the world of which they speak.
This article also appears in the September 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 9, pages 45-46). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Jean Francois Millet, The Angelus
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