On hearing the signal for an hour of the divine office, the monk will immediately set aside  what he has in hand and go with utmost speed, yet with gravity and without giving occasion  for frivolity. (Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter 43)

One of the distinctive features of the monastic experience, here shared by all on the campus, is the sounding of the bells. Indeed, the sounding of bells has come to be associated with the very life of the church:

For bells are the voice of the church;
They have tones that touch and search
       The hearts of young and old;
One sound to all, yet each
Lends a meaning to their speech,
       And the meaning is manifold.
(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Bells of San Blas)

Saint David was the gift of Charles Barney Wall in 1941. Wall in fact joined the monastic community in 1941, while in his mid-twenties, taking the name Aelred. He was actively involved in the monastery and School, eventually serving as Headmaster, until he moved on from the Portsmouth community to Mount Savior in New York, joining Gregory Borgstedt. Father Aelred subsequently went to New Mexico to found Christ in the Desert monastery, and ultimately made his way to Mexico, living as a hermit in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, where he is buried. In Saint David he has left one of his most tangible gifts with us.
 

A second bell of note in the monastery is a Buddhist standing bell, or “singing bowl,” known in Japanese as a “rin” or “rin gong,” which resides in the main corridor of the monastery. Buddhist standing bells come in an array of sizes and serve various purposes in Buddhist life and practice. They are utilized to assist meditation, promote healing, and deepen mindfulness. The monastery’s standing bell has perhaps more mundane uses, while still resonating with meditative connotation. It serves at times as a dinner bell, calling monks to meals from within the monastery. It also can serve as a reminder for some of the hours, or simply to get the attention of all of the monks to deliver in person any urgent or unexpected messages. Whether struck or made to resonate through friction, the rich tone can be heard from all of the monastic cells, more readily than the exterior David which is more distant from some of the rooms.

It was a gift of Elsie and John Mitchell to, as those familiar with Portsmouth's history might guess, Dom Aelred Graham. The gift stemmed from their shared involvement in the developing awareness of Buddhism in this country. Elsie Mitchell became one of the leading authorities and promoters of Buddhism in America, founding the Ahimsa Foundation of Cambridge, which assists humane societies and other organizations protecting wildlife, as well as co-founding the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Buddhist Association. Her husband John was an Englishman who had spent his childhood in Austria. The two of them became friends with Suzuki Roshi, having travelled widely in the exploration and study of Buddhism. In 1957, the couple trekked to Eiheiji and recorded chants and other sounds of the temple, which Folkways Records released in 1959, with Mitchell providing explanatory comments.

The Mitchell's encountered Aelred Graham along their journey, striking up a lifelong friendship. Dom Aelred wrote the forward to one of Elsie Mitchell's early books, Sun Buddhas, Moon Buddhas: A Zen Quest, described as a “chronicle of one woman's continuing quest for her true nature, her ‘Buddha's nature’: a quest that has carried her from her Unitarian roots in New England to marriage to an English Catholic born in Austria, and finally to Japan and the living traditions of Zen Buddhism.” (from Cuke.com: an "archival site" dedicated to Shunryu Suzuki) Graham, referred to by Mitchell as "The Zen Catholic Prior," plays no small role in that quest. Graham's brief foreword captures some of his personality and interests, as he speaks of reading her book with “a friendly, though not entirely uncritical, eye,” fnding in it “many parallels between the author’s discoveries and the message of Catholicism at its deepest.” Mitchell later published The Lion Dog of Buddhist Asia (1991), which appeals to dog lovers and Buddhist devotees alike. She died in Cambridge in 2011, having established herself, as had Dom Aelred, as a well-known pioneer of Buddhism in this country.