God as ORC
Geese! Having made themselves more and more at home over the past few days, a goose couple have laid claim to our beloved osprey nest at the Boulder County Fairgrounds in Longmont, Colorado. This morning, just as she was doing as I watched her yesterday, old mother goose is nesting comfortably, and I expect to see eggs any Time. Bird watchers in the area have reported seeing osprey arriving, but as of now, specifically yesterday and today, the osprey couple, known to watchers as Mom and New Dad, are overdue back home from their winter migration.
I think it was to be expected: the old Dad, who was well aged, did not show up last year; a new male bird took up with Mom osprey, who herself is getting on up in years. I'm not surprised if Mom osprey doesn't return, and I don't know enough about ospreys to know whether New Dad osprey will have bonded with the nest after just one season, and that unsuccessful, no eggs hatched last year; or whether he will jump to the first young beauty who whistles for a fish and take up at her nest.
Or whether, if the resident ospreys do arrive, they will be able to drive the geese away. IDK.
The year before last all the original osprey couple's hatchlings died, so it's been three years since we had hatchlings fledge and migrate from this nest.
Time moves on, and maybe it's Time for Time to do just that. Time will tell.
On my mind this morning - - being in this vocation, I try to wander not too far into things of this world from things heavenly, but it happens anyway. There are cars, and there is the Universe, and there is the Bay and Shell Island and the Gulf, and there are the ospreys in Colorado and the ospreys that I watch here, including this morning, swooping close by this window and circling over the Bay to spy a fish for breakfast, in fact I hear an osprey's shrill voice this very minute as I sit here typing; and there is the war in Ukraine, and mullet and oysters are always in mind, and grouper sandwiches at Bayou Joes; and the window beside me still leaking water in during severe storms and rotting the top of the window frame and dropping chips of paint onto the floor; and the beautiful prime rib roast that I bought at Christmas that we just fished out of the freezer to cook tomorrow seeing as we're going to church tonight; and there is the Southern type cornbread that Linda baked yesterday and is baking more today for this evening soup at church; and there is my awareness of aging, with my dreams and memories of life that drift in and out; and attention to the CHF that keeps me on FuroForty (lost five pounds with them yesterday); so I'm only a Holy Man part time. But I try. Honestly. Not very hard, but I try.
At any event, this morning's edition of Earth & Sky had a fascinating article about ORCs. When I think orc I think of Tolkien and my friends the Hobbits and the Wizard, and my years at HNES, and the children there, now in their late-twenties heading into their thirties, whom I so loved. It really messes me up. But the E&S - - this morning an image (below) and an article about ORCs, "odd radio circles" in space. I'd not heard of them. It turns out they are rarely seen, and that, visible only at radio wavelengths, they may be a million lightyears across, larger than our Milky Way, and may encompass an entire galaxy.
So this stirs the theologian in me, and, to an extent, the spiritual side and the preacher. "No one has ever seen God" says Gospel John, but the Word has made God known to us. We are not recommended to use metaphors to define God, and surely not the Trinity where it's so easy to wander unwittingly into heresy, but here's one anyway: ORCs. No one has ever seen an ORC either. In fact, you can't prove an ORC is there except by radio wavelength imaging, and even then you have to accept certain things and put others aside.
After thirty-eight years I'm still struggling with the late night Voice that, in response to my challenge at an especially difficult crossroad in my life, said "I AM speaking to you, Tom Weller" and assured me and let me go on confidently. Because of the Voice, like many other decision points, I am here in 7H this morning with a backpack of beloved memories, events that, as Barbara Crafton wrote yesterday, will always have happened and so always exist in the eternal NOW. My struggle: did that really happen? It was so real that I can conjure it back up in an instant; does that mean it was just an illusion? IDK. IDK nothing; but here I am. Was that really I AM speaking to me? I no longer am absolutely certain, of that or of anything, but do know that it's in the NOW, spoken to me by Who or What is as invisible as an ORC except when It chooses to be seen (Mark 9:1, ιδωσιν again, "they might see" - - or hear, discern).
Anyway, the metaphor: read the ORC essay below and see if you Get It.
RSF&PTL
T
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Odd radio circles perplex astronomers
Odd radio circles
The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) released a new image yesterday (March 22, 2022) of what it called the astronomy’s newest mystery. It’s the image you see above. Astronomers call it an odd radio circle or ORC. Astronomers have spotted only a handful of ORCs. They’re huge, about a million light-years across (16 times bigger than our Milky Way galaxy). Despite this, the ORCs are hard to see. They’re visible only at radio wavelengths. And, so far, they are unexplained. Since their discovery in 2019, astronomers have proposed different explanations for them, including galactic shockwaves, or the throats of wormholes. What are they?
Ray Norris from Western Sydney University and CSIRO, one of the authors on a new paper about ORCs, said only five odd radio circles have ever been revealed in space. Norris said in an article released March 21, on The Conversation:
We can now see each ORC is centred on a galaxy too faint to be detected earlier. The circles are most likely enormous explosions of hot gas, about a million light years across, emanating from the central galaxy.
But, he added, scientistds still don’t know what causes ORCs, or why they are so rare.
As of now, there are three leading theories to explain what causes ORCs:
– They could be the remnant of a huge explosion at the center of their host galaxy, like the merger of two supermassive black holes.
– They could be powerful jets of energetic particles spewing out of a galaxy’s center.
– They might be the result of a starburst “termination shock” from the production of stars in the galaxy.
It was Jordan Collier of the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy – formed by three South African universities – who compiled the new image. He used data from the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. Collier said:
People often want to explain their observations and show that they align with our best knowledge. To me, it’s much more exciting to discover something new, that defies our current understanding.