Well, she was sitting... I was fidgeting and staring at the hymn board adding and subtracting the columns and rows and diagonals, breaking the numbers into their prime components, and wondering why the thing was simply called a “hymn board” when virtually every other object/room in a church has some bizarre cheating-at-Scrabble-sounding name (pyx, narthex, etc.)
Church is hella-boring. This is a good thing, at least for me. Allow me to explain by way of example.
Once, we visited a church that had two dedicated musicians. About midway through the first song I wondered if the organist and the pianist hated the music they were playing, hated the instruments they were playing, or merely hated each other because it sounded less like they were complimenting each other's tune than it sounded like they were playing some sort of psuedo-musical version of Rock-em Sock-em Robots. The one thing they did seem to agree on is that “adagio” is basically the same as “allegro”, so songs on par in peppiness with “If You're Happy and You Know It” or “The Hokey Pokey” came out sounding like Klingon funeral dirges. They did usually start and finish at roughly the same time, though, so good for them.
For me, this “change-up” was an unwelcome distraction.
See, I need a certain staid predictability during a service to allow me to find my center much in the same way sitting on a yoga mat and trying to will your heart rate lower and lower does. I am peripherally aware of my surroundings – this allows me to stand and sit when required and not drool down my tie, for instance - but I am mostly tuned out in the geeky way I described in the first paragraph. I would be shocked if someone told me pulse was above 60bpm.
But this time I was fidgeting because the 10% of me that was paying attention to things alerted me to the fact that I must have heard the story of The Good Samaritan about a billion times in my life, either formally or in passing. The same thing goes for story of The Good Shepherd, the Creation Myth(s), and the parting of the Red Sea. Even if you have never stepped foot in a church, odds that you know enough of those stories to “get by”. Heck, my kid has been taught the (highly abridged) story of Jonah and the Whale at least four times that I know of in his short life.
Do we go regularly? No. Certainly not above what Wikipedia says is “average”, but that makes my point even more... pointed, I guess.
The Bible is a long book, but it is largely inappropriate to draw life lessons from. Calm down, calm down – I am speaking purely statistically, here... Pick a page at random, style of thing.
Anyway, tribe populations, tabernacle building instructions, and the endless lists of begats and begottens aren't going to make the cut into the Sunday service. Ancient dietary guidelines, under-reported zombie attacks, and other hard-to-explain stuff will also be skipped. And the more... um... esoteric sections of the books of Revelation and Job are probably not going to be shoehorned into any but the most borderline manifesto-ish sermons.
Secondly, a lot of the year is eaten up by stuff surrounding Easter and Christmas and other holidays, and there are only a handful of pages that are appropriate to read around that time. Finally, the material has been pretty much the same for hundreds and hundreds of years. See, you can easily tell if you are in a “cult” rather than a “church” if your pew bible a) has “Version 4.1.1” or similar on the front or b) suddenly contains sloppily tacked-in loose-leaf appendices referred to as the books of Skippy or Chad.
So I wanted to know how many times I had heard, formally, the Water into Wine story (or whatever) in my lifetime. To do that I needed two things. The first was a word count of each book in the Bible. The second was a large enough sample of the readings to determine what passages were hit upon over a certain (longish) time period.
Oddly, it was hard to find a user-friendly version of a book-by-book word count of the Bible without venturing into the creepier parts of the Internet WHERE RELIGIOUS FOLKS SPEAK IN ALL CAPS FOR SOME REASON. I guess I am just accustomed to “the Google” spitting out an undebatable answer to questions like “How many words are in the book of Genesis?” that I was a little dismayed to find there appeared to be no single trustworthy resource for exactly what I needed. I was certainly not going to count words by hand.
Sigh. Fine. Code-writing time (I dislike programming, FWIW). I found a text-only version of the King James Version and my program counted all the words verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter, and book-by-book. Great. Now what?
Well, it turns out that getting a list of passages that have been read over the past several years is easy if your church (like mine) uses something called a lectionary (Oh, red underline it if you must, OpenOffice word processing program... it's a real word). Apparently there are dedicated passages that “must” (well... some are optional) be read and these passages progress in a three-year cycle – years A, B, and C. That makes my job a little easier – I only need to count up the words in three years worth of readings and I will be close to my answer.
I sighed and wrote another piece of code to help automate the counting of the words in all of the passages referenced by the lectionary (optional ones, too). Even with this program this was a real pain because readings routinely skip verses or cross chapter boundaries. The program then boiled down those results to eliminate duplicates.
Enough chat. Here's the data. All errors are my own, of course, but I don't think there is anything here that is so out of whack as to buck the overall trend.
Definitions:
Total = Number of words
Used = Number of words in book referenced in lectionary (duplicates included)
Percent = Used/Total * 100%
Unique = Number of words in book referenced in lectionary (duplicates eliminated)
Unique Percent = Unique/Total * 100%
 |
| Click to Enlarge |
NOTE 1: You will notice that some books (Hebrews, for example) appear to have in excess of 100% of it's content used over a three-year period. This shows that there is a lot of repetition in the lectionary covering this book. As a matter of fact, although only 40% of the book is used, the passages that are touched upon are used a little under three times each.
NOTE 2: My count of 789,617 words for the King James Bible is close but wrong. I am man enough to admit that. It deviates by less than one quarter of 1%, though, from other word counts out there... Perfectly fine for what I needed. Again, I have to say that any errors are my own.
Hey! Who doesn't like a nice histogram? Here is the table above in chart form, grouped into 5%-wide bins:
 |
| Click to Enlarge |
 |
| Click to Enlarge |
- Least Used: 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Obadiah, Nahum, 2 John, 3 John, Jude (0%)
- Least-Used-Without-Being-Ignored: Judges (1.0%)
- Most Used: Ephesians (69.0%)
- Most Repeated: Philippians (Used/Unique = 2.99)
- Least Repeated-Without-Being-Ignored: Judges, Ruth, Nehemiah, Esther, Micah, Haggai, Zechariah, Philemon, 2 Peter (Used/Unique = 1.00)
- First 5 Books of Bible (Pentateuch): 10.9% used
- Entire Old Testament: 11.8% used
- Gospels: 47.7% used
- Entire New Testament: 44.5% used
- Entire Bible: 19.3% used.
Hmmm... Let's say a Bible is 1,000 pages long. That means that we are left with a book that can effectively be condensed to 193 pages. Using the percentages above, that translates to an Old Testament 91 pages long and a New Testament 102 pages long.
But the other 807 apparently unused pages certainly lend some heft to the tome so I don't recommend removing them. Perhaps replacing them with coupons, ad space, or Sudoku contests might be the way to make use of this excess real estate while generating revenue for the church. I presume Amazon and Google are working on the matter...
Now that I have an answer to my question I can get back to tuning out the world for fifty minutes every other Sunday or so. Unless that unbearably perky guest guitar player dude is scheduled to show up again to kill my chi, that is. In that case I'll be tuning out the world while shoveling mulch and trimming the hedges, instead.
Meh... zen is zen.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment