How smart is an iPod? could it do a lectionary automatically?

Factual Questions
1

A thought occurred to me the other day as I was walking to work, listening to my iPod.

Is it smart enough to do a lectionary automatically, synching to the date without me having to scroll through the contents and select the readings for that date?

For example, in the Anglican cycle, there’s the weekly Collect, Epistle and Gospel, read on Sunday, plus the daily Propers for each day of the week (normally an OT and a NT reading for the morning and evening), plus the special Saints’ days.

So,could the iPod download someone reading the lectionary, and when I select that, it syncs to the calendar and automatically gives me the readings for, say, Friday morning in the 20th week after Pentecost? or, if it happens to be a Saint’s day, give me those readings, without me having to select it manually?

2

An ipod touch or iphone could definitely do it. I’m not sure if a Classic or Nano could. This application tells you the readings for the day, but I don’t think it actually links to them:

http://www.universalis.com/n-download-iPhone.htm

There are also a number of daily podcasts for sermons and readings, just google podcast bible OR lectionary

3

There are, however, some oddball things about the Church Calendar, AKA Christian Year, that need to be taken into account.

First, the whole freaking year, except for “fixed feasts” – i.e., events that happen on the same day of the month and year every year, mostly saints days – is in two massive chunks that slide back and forth against each other, overriding each other like tectonic plates, over the month-day-year secular calendar. And what makes them move are the moving dates of Christmas and Easter.

Whoa!, you say; Christmas always falls on December 25. Well, that’s true, but the day of the week it falls on moves from year to year. And Easter, famously, always falls on the Sunday after the full moon after the Vernal Equinox – which gives it a spead of a little over five weeks of calendar time in which to occur.

Here’s the scoop:

Christmas is always preceded by the four Sundays in Advent. But the fourth week in Advent can be from one to seven days long, because Christmas terminates it. Suppose Christmas falls on a Sunday. Then the four Sundays immediately preceding it are November 27 and December 4, 11, and 18, and Advent runs four full weeks. But if Christmas falls on a Monday, the four Sundays preceding it are December 3, 0, 17, and 24 – and the same day is, in the morning, Fourth Sunday in Advent, and in the evening, Christmas Eve. Then Epiphany falls on January 6, which of course moves with Christmas over the course of the week, so there may be either one or two Sundays after Christmas before the Epiphany.

Likewise, suppose the cycles fall together just right such that the Vernal Equinox falls on March 20 (as it did this year), which is by coincidence also both the day before the full moon and a Friday. Then the full moon falls on Saturday, and the next day, being the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox, is also Easter – on March 22. On the other hand, suppose the full moon occurs just before midnight on March 20, on a year where the Vernal Equinox is on March 21. Then the next full moon will be 29.5 days later, in the early hours of April 19. But to play this out for maximum spread, that happens to be a Sunday – so the next Sunday, the first one after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox, is April 26.

Now: Ash Wednesday, starting Lent, falls 40 days, excluding Sundays, before Easter, hence any time from February 4 to March 10. Pentecost is 50 days after Easter (May 10 to June 13 spread) with Trinity Sunday a week later (sometime between May 17 and June 20 inclusive).

Confused yet?

Well, the First Sunday after Epiphany is traditionally the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist – but of course can fall any time from January 7-13, depending on which day of the week Epiphany falls on. Then there are propers for the Second, Third, etc. Sundays after Epiphany –except that the Sunday just before Ash Wednesday, the Last Sunday after Epiphany, is always commemorating the Transfiguration, the transition from Jesus’s preaching ministry in and around Galilee to his journey to Jerusalem and Crucifixion. So you can have from four to nine “Sundays after Epiphany.”

It gets worse. The Sundays that follow Pentecost and Trinity Sunday are traditionally called “the Nth Sunday after Trinity” – American church and a few others have changed this to “Nth Sunday after Pentecost,” the ordinal number being, obviously, one higher. But the weird part is, that’s now how the propers are laid out. The set of readings there work backward from Advent Sunday, the front end just after Trinity Sunday being clipped if Easter is late that year. However, they’re the same lections as 5-8 Epiphany, so you get them either before or after the Lent-Easter-Pentecost complex, depending on which is the long sequence.

Finally, you get two other small kickers – the first Sunday in November may fall on November 1, All Saints’ Day, or during the week after. There’s a proper lection set appointed for that Sunday if it’s Nov. 2-7 – but it’s Rector’s choice whether to use it or the All Saints’ Day lectionary. Also, whatever day the patron saint of a parish church falls on, or the following Sunday, is also Rector’s choice as to whether to supersede the day’s legionary with the one for the Patron Saint. (The same privilege goes for ‘Church of the Ascension’, ‘Holy Cross Church,’ etc. – the feast days commemorat6ing them work like a patron saint’s proper.)

Now – wanna write a program that takes all that into account? :smiley:

4

Sure. Just make it link to a website maintained by someone else who does pay attention to all of the minutiae.

Actually, you could do it all in programming. First, convert the current date into a Julian day or ctime or the like, and then it’s all just a matter of the phase of three different regular, predictable cycles (week, lunar month, and year). I could code it up in an hour, and it’d only be a half-hour if I weren’t so out of practice, assuming that I had the correct formulae to work from.

That just leaves the question of whether an iPod has enough power and versatility to be able to run such a program. But I’ve seen Linux installed on iPods, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that they’d be able to handle something like this, too.

5

Actually, that kinda sounds like an interesting project. I’d take a crack at it if I still knew any programming other than Mathematica.

6

I produce the Ordo for Australia for the parishes that use the traditional Roman rite (aka 1962 missal, or the Tridentine mass, or the extraordinary form of the Roman rite post Summorum Pontificum). I’ve programmed the rubrics for the 1962 liturgical calendar, and I don’t imagine that they’d be too dissimilar from those of the Anglican calendar. It’s not as difficult as you might think. The key dates for the temporal cycle are the first Sunday of Advent and Easter Sunday. The first Sunday of Advent is simply the Sunday falling between 27 November and 3 December inclusive. And there are simple algorithms that calculate the date of Easter Sunday for any given year. Then it’s just a matter of slotting in any Easter related dates e.g.
Septuagesima Sunday is Easter-63
Ash Wednesday is Easter-46
Palm Sunday is Easter-7
Ascension is Easter+39
Pentecost is Easter+49
Trinity is Easter+56
Corpus Christi is Easter+60
Sacred Heart is Easter+68 etc.

The last Sunday after Pentecost has to be the one falling between 20 November and 26 November inclusive.

The dates for the sanctoral cycle are all fixed, and are easy enough to slot in. And the rubrics contain clear rules about the precedence of liturgical days. By following these, it’s quite straightforward to populate each day in the calendar with the correct liturgical day.

7

thanks for the replies, everyone. so it sounds doable, in theory, but then there’s still the question of whether an ipod is smart enough to handle it.

what’s the difference between an ipod touch and a nano? is it a new version of the ipod?

I just have this image of Rowan Williams’s soft Welsh accent, reading the Collects from the 1662 BCP, with the lessons from the KJV…

8

Is the difference because the iPod Touch has a wireless connexion?

I guess what I’m really asking is whether the iPod has the capacity to be programmed - if someone put out a CD with all of the readings pre-recorded, plus a program to auto-select the readings for the day, could both be loaded onto an iPod?

9

Yes, iPods of all varieties can be programmed. In some cases it’ll require a hack to modify the firmware, but it can be done for all of them. It’s fundamentally no different from those iPod updates that you download from time to time. You could probably do it without a hack on a Touch.

10

This actually sounds like a very simple problem for a computer, it’s all just a bunch of straightforward math. It just looks difficult to humans, because humans find math difficult, to a computer (and the iPod definitely is a computer), this is just about the easiest kind of problem you can throw at it.

You could probably write the code to do it on a portable calculator from 1972 (memory may be too tight on that machine to fit the whole algorithm - but that’s just about the only problem I see). iPods are much, much more powerful than that.