If you travel a lot … or if you live a long time … you acquire a lot of trinkets. Souvenirs of travels. Memories of events.

I bought a little polar bear when I was in the Arctic. It sits in our living room now. It brings back nice memories of my trip to Norway last month.

But most of the trinkets I’ve collected now reside in cardboard boxes in the garage. They’ll probably never get a chance to collect dust in the limited trinket display areas of our home.

My sister, Jenni, came to visit last month and pulled out a wooden bell which had a coveted space in our limited trinket display area. ‘Remember this?’ she asked. ‘I have one just like it.’

I looked at the hand-carved wooden bell and indeed remembered it … and then realised that sub-consciously I have always chosen that wooden bell for my limited trinket display area for the past 40 years. My polar bear will one day join its fellow forgotten trinkets in the cardboard box in the garage … but not that bell. It will always have a special spot in our limited trinket display area.

Jenni and I couldn’t quite recollect all of the details of the origins of the bell but we knew our mom and stepdad, Ralph, bought one for all their children while they were volunteering at Heifer International in Arkansas. I remember that Ralph gave me my bell while we were sitting at the dinner table. He read off the words inscribed on the bell ‘No one listens to the cry of the poor or the sound of a wooden bell’ and told me of its meaning.

Ralph told me it’s a Haitian proverb which highlights the overlooked cries of the poor and impoverished. Their cries can be like the muted sound of a wooden bell. No one hears them.

Christians have a bit of a twist to that in Proverbs 21:13: “Whoever shuts their ears to the cry of the poor will also cry out and not be answered.” Likewise, some surahs in the Qur’an teach that God is attentive to the cries of the poor, and those who ignore them are spiritually at risk.

Ralph heard the cry of the poor throughout his life and showed it through his deeds. He was a devout Christian. But he was one of those Christians who actually paid heed to the preachings of Jesus Christ when it came to the poor. Ralph was generous with his time and money and always reached out to help those in need.

Ralph dinged the wooden bell at the dinner table. Despite its muted sound, I heard it loudly and clearly. Maybe at the dinging of that wooden bell I became ‘woke’. I developed an empathy for the poor and the disenfranchised of the world and realised we just weren’t paying enough attention to their pleas. I started waking up to the cry of the people.

Ralph isn’t around anymore. He joined the bell ringers in the sky at the young age of 66 in 1993. But if he were with us, I have no doubt he would ditch the wooden bell and grab the biggest friggin’ metal bell he could find and climb to the top of the highest mountain and ring that bell so loudly that the oligarchs and autocrats now in authoritative control of the United States Government couldn’t help but listen to the cry of the poor.