Statistics.

Have to be careful when I talk about stats - for many years they were the way I earned my living, or at least the raw data that fed the way I earned my living, and now I have a Stats Prof among my congregation.

The advantage/disadvantage of having worked professionally with stats is knowing how to read them - or at least how to guess what questions to ask about how to read them.  But all that knowledge is a double-edged sword when you become part of the stats rather than a mere observer of them.  It sharpens your 'hermeneutic of suspicion' as to how the data are compiled and how much smoothing of complex multivariate stuff goes on to give some general figures.

I think it struck me most when I read that 'every 11 minutes someone in the UK is diagnosed with breast cancer,' which is blatantly not true as no clinic is open 24/7 which would be needed for this to be the case.  46,000 a year (give or take) is equivalent to one every eleven minutes, but that's not how it works.  Today roughly 125 women and 1 man will be given this diagnosis - not neatly eleven minutes apart and not evenly spread throughout the nation.  Most will be over 50 and the oldest among them will have other age-related health issues but some will be in their twenties with everything to live for.  126 worlds turned upside down.

And then the are the other stats that arrive regularly - a child dies every 3 seconds in poverty, one every 15 seconds from lack of clean water; a women in the USA is beaten roughly every 15 seconds, and so on and so forth.  Again, not neatly defined, not equally spread, and not tidily 24/7 but whole clumps and communities devastated by disaster.  People in the poorest or most disadvantaged places, people for whom suffering is often normative.  People whose worlds I can never know or really imagine.

There's a point to the averages of course - a child dying every three seconds is something we can imagine, six-ish people an hour receiving a medical diagnosis is conceivable.  But it is all, ultimately, too big for our minds to process - we can only take in so much, can only care beyond the superficial for so many people or causes.  Maybe we don't need more numbers, or even better ways of presenting them, maybe what we need is time and space to think of the real people they represent.  On balance of probability, this afternoon in Glasgow someone will be told she (or he) has breast cancer... on balance whilst I've typed this stuff the equivalent of a whole primary school has died in some part of Africa... these are real people with real stories.  I can't know these people; I can't help them, but I can at least be aware of them.