When I recite the Gospel of Luke from memory, up to chapter nine verse fifty, it takes more than an hour. Sometimes actors have to memorize a lot of lines, and sometimes monks memorize large portions of scripture. But apart from these two instances, I don’t know who would be compelled to undergo such an exercise.
It’s not that I have a great memory. When I started, it was with the notion that my limits would become apparent, and that would restrict how much I could memorize.
But with consistency, regularly adding lines and reciting what I know daily, the amount grew beyond what had at first seemed possible. When the total reached more than an hour, then the limitation emerged of how much I could rehearse each day to maintain what I had learned.
It would have been nice to continue on to the end of the Gospel of Luke, but in order to keep that in memory, I would have to recite it for more than three hours a day. I’m sure that with good organization, I could set up a routine where a section is recited each day, with the sections cycling through a weekly pattern, so that all of the material is covered. That may become necessary in the future.
I would like to memorize all of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, because they are by the same author and are a single, continuous narrative. This will certainly require proper organization to keep things memorized.
I haven’t experimented with delays, to see how long it takes for something to disappear from my memory. That’s because I don’t want to lose what I’ve already worked to acquire. But that may become an issue as I try to expand the project.
If there is enough interest in the Gospel of Luke Project, and there are plenty of venues in which to perform it, then I will work on the rest of the Gospel. Until then, it seemed prudent to stop at an hour and a half of material, so test the waters, and see if there is enough interest to sustain it.
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