Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Peace, all.
I've dusted my algebra off and put it to use for liturgical purposes:
m = 48(H-2) +12
and its corollary:
H = ((m-12)/48) +2
Amy Welborn (http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/) has a great blog and she commented this morning on the length and content of a bishop's Confirmation homily. Last Spring, our local bishop, a seemingly nice guy and cancer survivor, came to preside at Confirmation. His office told us that if we had a mid-week liturgy, there would be no Eucharist. First time in my experience, but I understood if the bishop wanted to ration his energy for his health, it seemed a wise choice, if not a liturgically quirky one. Then he preached for about forty minutes. And I thought, "Heck. He could have trimmed 15-18 minutes off this homily and done Mass." As it was, the Confirmation Word Service was well over an hour long.
This brings us to my Homily Formula, in which "m" is preparation time for a homily in minutes, and "H" equals the length of a homily in minutes. Instructions: If you want to know how long to prepare, simply plug in your expected homily length (H) in equation number one. Obviously, divide by 60 to get hours of prep time. If you want to know how long you can preach, use equation number two. Insert the number of minutes you have to prepare this week (m) and do the math.
And they say that math and science education is wasted on us touchy-feely liturgist types. Ha!
