Catholic Sensibility

I love algebra, don't you? My third-grade daughter was showing me her homework the other night. Some problem like Jane drives 450 miles one weekend to visit her mother. Saturday she drives 50 miles more than on Sunday, and arrives for Sunday dinner. Poor Brittany. They haven't taught algebra yet. This problem would be a snap if she could reduce the problem to an equation: 450= (x+50) + x Combine the x's and you get: 450 = 2x + 50 Subtract fifty from each side and you get: 400 = 2x Divide each side by 2 and you get: x = 200 And because x is the number of miles on day two, Jane drove 250 miles on the first day. Aside from the fact that if I were in Jane's shoes, I'd put the pedal to the metal and get there in time for Saturday dinner, but I digress ... Somebody criticized my suggestion that on average, a priest should prepare about an hour for every minute of length of his Sunday homily, and it brought to mind a CS post from 18 Nov 2003: 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 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! Here's a simple table for homily length: prep time in hours ------------------- homily length in minutes

-------- 0 -------------------------------------- 1.75 -------- 1 -------------------------------------- 3 -------- 2 -------------------------------------- 4.25 -------- 3 -------------------------------------- 5.5 -------- 4 -------------------------------------- 6.75 -------- 5 -------------------------------------- 8 -------- 6 -------------------------------------- 9.25 -------- 7 -------------------------------------- 10.5 -------- 8 -------------------------------------- 11.75 -------- 9 -------------------------------------- 13 ------- 10 -------------------------------------- 14.25 ------- 15 -------------------------------------- 20.5 I guess I'm giving preachers a break on Sundays, but if a guy has spent no time preparing a daily Mass homily, I give him 105 seconds, max, before it's time to pull the plug. I'm not too convinced that this is ill-spent time, or too much wasted effort. Nothing else a priest does affects as many people as his homilies. They should be meticulously prepared and backed up by voice training, Scripture study, continuing ed, and the substantial input of people who can give constructive feedback. If he's preaching for ten minutes on Sunday to hundreds of people if not a few thousand, consider the time spent per person in preparation. I still think he's getting off cheap. Keep working hard, Father, on those homilies. We're pulling for you, and we can back it up with fancy math.