Freeday 25 May 2001

Pic of the day: OK, here is the landscape of yesterday, the way God meant it to be! :)

"Sorry, wrong Jesus"

Well, in addition to my more spiritual worries, my only Internet PC fell down and struck its head. It is still picking up bad sectors. I may have to buy SpinRite yet. I would have done so long ago if they offered online trading. Speaking American on the phone is not my area of expertise, as a certain nice journaller can attest.

I discovered this morning that the phone was not connected. Evidently I had forgotten to put the connector back in after unsuccessfully trying to use that other phone line for Internet access. (I usually use the black cord for that, the white for phone ... don't put too much symbolism into it though...)

It's not like I would have noticed. It isn't every week the phone is used at all. I call my best friend on earth a few times a year, and I call work when I am sick (as I was today, but it went over by itself). My relatives call me if anyone is dying or born. A bit more frequent are calls is by Tele2, my phone company, trying to interest me in either something I already have or something I don't want. Last time they tempted me that for a small sum (unspecified) I could call for free every Saturday for a certain time. In Norway only, of course. They forgot to mention that until I asked, but I thought so, or it would soon be very bad business for them. Problem is, I can't say for sure that I have ever called within Norway on a Saturday in my life. I will not swear that I haven't either, but it certainly does not happen every year. (I am pretty sure I have called once or twice on a Saturday on my mobile phone, but then on behalf of SuperWoman.)

But the clear majority of calls are people who dial the wrong number. Evidently people must be doing this a lot, and it seems not to be the same people either. It is not like all wrong calls are redirected to me either, so there must be a collossal activity of dialling wrong numbers in this country. This is not so strange, since there are 8 digits while the human brain can usually only hold 7. Until a few years ago, we had area codes, which people remember separately.

The main telephone operator and until recently monopoly, Telenor, has steadily raised the start price, which you pay as soon as connection is established. If my connection is typical, they must earn millions on this traffic. I wonder how they feel about it. I may be cynical, but I don't expect more brain-friendly numbers in the near future.

But making a honest error is part of the human condition. I answer politely, though at times I simply pick up the receiver and say: "You have dialed a wrong number." In the unlikely case that they have not, they will recognize my voice. So far I have been right, though.

***

More serious, at least in my opinion, is our tendency to err in other ways. And like some of the callers who seem mystified and slightly miffed that they cannot get to speak with the desired person even though they have called the wrong number ... so we all have an inclination to stick to our errors as long as we can. Which brings me to today's headline.

The world is finally teeming with Christians, which should be a good thing, seen from a Christian perspective. (My apologies to those who consider Christianity a pest and a plague.) My problem with it is that we seem to have so many different christs and so many gospels.

It is a well known fact that Catholics and Protestants have been killing each other off and on routinely for generations, and in Ulster (or Northern Ireland to the Catholics) they still do. The Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches have been separated in deep distrust for hundreds of years, and at one time there were even three different popes in the Catholic church. (Though it is hard to say how much of that was religion and how much was power grabbing for worldly benefits.)

On a smaller scale, Norway and especially the south coast is dotted with "bedehus", prayer houses. These are not hallowed, indeed they look mostly like old school houses, but they are built for worship and used pretty much exclusively for this. Many people have used these prayer houses as a supplement to the Sunday mass - indeed, some places have not been able to afford a priest for each church and may have a mass only every second or third week. But there are also plenty of examples where there has been a deep distrust between the "high church" people who stick to the ornamental church, and the "low church" people who gather in the prayer house at their own schedules.

To further complicate matters, on the south coast there are often different prayer houses in each village. This because a part of the congregation has broken out and founded their own, purer and holier group. This could be caused by excessive drinking and wenching on behalf of the current spiritual shepherd, but usually it is a matter of doctrine. It could be something pretty fundamental, such as how much water is needed to baptize people, and who can be baptized. Or it could be so obscure that few or no one remember anymore what originally split the groups apart. And then the split-offs split again ... it can get quite bushy after a while.

Sometimes it seems to me that all of us who have Jesus in our heart have our own little Jesus, and these Jesuses are not always in agreement at all. This is highly suspicious, to say the least. It seems that we do indeed see through a glass, darkly. Stained glass more like it. That sometimes - and perhaps not rarely, either - we end up talking with the wrong Jesus. That is kind of disconcerting, once you think about it.

"Oops, sorry. Wrong Jesus." But who would be willing to admit that?