In baseball, you count absolutely everything. Gets pretty obsessive, but if you love baseball, you learn to love counting too. Who knew it’s the same with religion?

The “people of the book,” the ancient Hebrews who wrote the scriptures Christians cherish as well, counted everything. But their numbers didn’t have to be accurate to be true. Literal accuracy was not the point. Hebrew numbers, like their letters, carried meaning, and Hebrew letters were also numbered, so words had numbers that had meaning, and counts of time, people, things, had meaning too. It was a complex system for conveying meaning encoded into our scripture, and if we are to understand original intent, we need to pay attention to the counting.

We just finished counting the forty days of Lent—meaning a time of trial and testing into rebirth. Now with Easter passed, Jesus risen, seems we should be done counting. But Easter Sunday started a new count, one built on the Hebrew counting between their ancient barley and wheat harvests, Passover and Shavu’ot, Exodus and giving of the Law—meaning a gradual graduation from physical liberation to spiritual freedom. Meaning built into the Christian counting between Easter and Pentecost.

Both traditions count seven weeks of seven, 49 plus one day, 50. The Christian tradition breaks this down to forty plus ten: forty days with the risen Jesus on earth, ten more to integrate Jesus’ unseen spirit before Pentecost. Symbolic, not literal.

We think of salvation as an event, a moment when God bestows acceptance, but scriptures show the experience of Jesus’ followers as gradually becoming ready to see that salvation is not given at all. It is experienced, realized, remembered... No one recognizes the risen Jesus until intimacy is re-experienced in a period of adjustment to altered states of awareness, from physical presence to unseen spirit—until we can remember the Pentecost moment, full awareness, is possible.

All God has is already here, within. The shape of our journey is a counting until we’re ready to see. The counting gives structure, symbolic meaning, and the reminder that we’re all in the count.