Sunday April 9, 2023

With Easter weekend heralding warmer weather – except in Winnipeg, I gather – and with nothing important to say about Easter, I decided to emulate Otis Redding: “Sitting on a dock in the bay…”
Redding watched the tides. A few very big lakes have tides. Okanagan lake doesn’t. It’s dead level. It does have waves, though.
I enjoy watching waves. On B.C.’s west coast, in the Caribbean, in Hawaii, I’ve spent hours watching waves crashing against the rocks, sending great spouts of spray high into the air. No two waves are exactly the same, so each spout is unpredictable.
I’ve also watched little waves. A light breeze whiffles across a glassy calm and sets up tiny ripples. They seem completely random, falling over each other.
But as those little ripples build on other little ripples, they become bigger ripples. Which mass together to form a small wave. As the wind picks up, they pile onto each other and form bigger waves. Until they turn into great foam-crested rollers, charging up the lake like tanks on a battlefield…

What a wave isn’t
But let’s be clear – a wave itself is not a moving mass of water rushing along like a river. If it were, waves blowing up from the south would combine to bury the marshes at the head of the lake hundreds of metres underwater.
That’s what happens in hurricane storm surges, but they’re an exception.
And that’s why a duck can float calmly in the same place as waves surge past her.
A wave is actually just water molecules making a circular pattern, like feet on bicycle pedals. The molecules at the crest of a wave are on the top of their circuit. Then they drop down, and circle back, so they can rise up again for the next wave crest.
The water in a wave hasn’t actually moved at all. Even though there has been a rising and falling of the surface.
There’s a mathematical formula for waves, of course. It defines the relationship between the size of the wave, the speed it’s travelling, and the distance between crests.
The bigger the wave, in open water, the faster it travels, The faster it travels, the greater the distance between crests.
The tides that Otis Redding watched are our fastest moving waves. Two giant waves circle the entire earth every 24 hours. The ocean itself barely moves, but the crest of a tide travels 1,000 miles (1,625 km) per hour!
Remember, it’s not a great blob of water racing along that fast – it’s the speed at which more-or-less static molecules transmit their energy to the next molecule.

Waves and other things
Strangely enough, the formula for waves also fits something quite different – traffic flow.
You have surely noticed that as cars speed up leaving a traffic light, the space between them increases? And they clump together when they slow down? Wave pattern, again. Each car acts like the crest of a wave. Speed and distance…
As another oddity, quantum physics teaches us that sub-atomic particles are not real things that can be measured. They’re more like probabilities. Some scientists actually use the term “wave patterns” to describe them.
The probabilities of quarks and electrons resolve into fixed time and place only when scientists make the effort to observe them.
That too is like a water wave. A wave has no dimensions. You cannot measure a wave, because by the time you’ve measured it, it is already something different. It has changed its height, its speed, its location.
A wave is a moving target. The only way to fix a wave is to take a picture of it. Effectively, to freeze it on film. And thereby in time and place.

Waves at cross purposes
Wave theory even offers insights into cultural upheaval..
With a steady south wind on the lake, waves will uniformly march north. But if the wind shifts to a westerly, the new wind will build its own wave patterns at right angles to the former waves.
Before long, you have chaos, with sets of waves trying to override each other.
Doesn’t that seem like what’s happening in Iran? Iran’s rigid religious rule has had its way for centuries. Suddenly, women are making waves that move in a different direction.
Or the U.S., where criss-cross waves come from women, Blacks, Indigenous, gays… Meanwhile, half the population still tries to ride the same waves it has known for generations.
Otis Redding described sitting on a dock, watching the water, as “wasting time.” I disagree. It’s never wasting time if you can explore new thoughts and make new connections,
It’s only wasted time if you never let yourself entertain a new thought.
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Copyright © 2023 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn

Bryan Snider “much appreciated your recent column, comparing Christia Freeland to Jesus. (In a way….) Well written, and a great analogy!”
JT: I’m less happy about my analogy now that the Trump loyalists in the U.S. have started directly relating Trump to Jesus – even proclaiming him their”saviour.”

Bob Rollwagen confirmed my guess that few churches would include the federal budget in their Palm Sunday sermons: “Palm Sunday went well at Pine River. No mention of any budget. In fact I had forgotten about it by Tuesday evening.”

David Gilchrist: “I guess I’m out of step with the majority of ‘Believers’. I have been struck by the propensity of ‘good people’ to self-righteously accuse others of heresy,if they see things differently. The Bible is not free of hyperbola; and frequently says ‘all the peopl’” of this place or that -- when it really means a large number of them.
“We don’t know if a significant number of the folk who shouted ‘Hosanna’, were shouting ‘Crucify’ five days later. There were a lot of people in Jerusalem; and it could well be that a few took part in both cries. But I suspect there were many on Palm Sunday who did NOT cry ‘Hosanna’; and I know there were some on Good Friday who did NOT cry ‘Crucify’.
“Personalities Of The Passion,” (I think by Leslie Weatherhead), sees each of the accused characters in a different light. Jesus knew the errand of Judas, and told him to go. When Judas saw how the plan backfired, he killed himself! Soldiers who were captured during the war agreed with Peter’s response. What would WE do in that situation? Etc.
“People who throw these accusations at the characters in question, do so from limited information, and never try to walk in the shoes of the accused in those circumstances.
“That little book is really worth reading!”