Just Push This Button

       “His mother also told him how the chiming of that old bell had once filled her heart with joy and confidence, and that in the midst of the sweet tones her child had been given to her. And the boy gazed on the large, old bell with the deepest interest. He bowed his head over it and kissed it, old, thrown away, and cracked as it was, and standing there amidst the grass and nettles. The boy never forgot what his mother told him, and the tones of the old bell reverberated in his heart…” from The Old Church Bell, Hans Christian Andersen, 1861

Checking the Facebook page the other morning, I noticed my buddy was on. Like me, she’s a late comer to Facebook. In fact, she’s still learning the ropes. I pull up the chat page – “Hi!” I type. No response…. aaaand….no response.

My eye strays to the latest issue of The Economist sitting on my desk. The magazine is open to a small article about Christian churches in Jerusalem making the move from human-powered bells calling the faithful, to mechanical bells.

Rarely in this fractious holy city do clerics cede rights for which they used to wage holy wars. But from the Abbey of the Dormition to Jesus’s resting place in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the bell-ringers of Jerusalem are abandoning their ropes after a century and a half, and installing automated timers instead.

The computer emits a lilting, gurgle-ring. It’s my buddy. “Hey!” she’s typed. “I had to ask my son what to do because I’ve never chatted on FB before.”

We type back and forth about what they’ve been up to the last few days, how she just took her son to see the Hobbit at the IMAX theatre and what they thought. “It was amazing,” she says. “I’ve never read the book, but I really liked the movie.”

“Confession time,” I respond. “I've never made it through the book either.”

“No way!”

“Way.”

My eye strays back to the Economist article.

…times and technology change. The churches now compete for the latest mod cons, including manpower-saving bells that chime at the touch of a button. “The old way was kind of a hassle,” sighs Athanasius Macora, a Franciscan friar whose church was the city’s first to automate its bells. “You had to be there on time.”

After a few minutes, the computer gurgles again  (I’m sure she’s doing other things, too). “So, this is kind of fun.”

“Yeah,” I type. “I have friends...they spend a lot of time online, and they always stop by and say hi when I get on. It’s kind of the equivalent of chatting over the fence while you’re hanging out the laundry.”

…With their bells on autopilot, the churches can compete with the mosques [who record and broadcast their calls to prayer] and the air-siren that Israelis use to call in the Sabbath.

“I can see that,” she types. “I miss being there with you, though, face to face. It’s not really the same.”

Aesthetes say they can hear a difference between traditional bell-ringing and today’s phoney jingling bells.

“Me too, G,” I smile a smile she can’t see. “I miss you, too.”