Here comes Christmas:

As our annual orbit of the sun approaches winter solstice, we in the Christian world celebrate the occasion as Christmas. But not without the usual griping from unhappy members of the progressive (chaotic) end of our social spectrum. They would like to do away with the festival all together.

We don't hear much about these self-appointed apologists for the Christian world this year, probably because members of our Toronto media are busy piling on mayor Rob Ford. The wild typhoon in the Philippines helped a little, too.

But back to Christmas. Christmas comes to us from early Christian strategists who thought it was a good idea to attach this festival to the traditional seasonal celebration of the Return of the Sun. Instead of sacrificing virgins, burning towering wooden effigies filled with assorted criminals, our ancestors had their wild partying toned down by Christian activists to make it more suitable for a civilized society.

In time, it became normal to celebrate the occasion by exchanging gifts, practicing good will and tolerance, feasting, indulging in holiday spirits and doing our best to behave and be nice. We do all this to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, who was offered as the ultimate role model for how all good Christians ought to behave.

It doesn't really matter when Jesus Christ was born. Dec. 25 is when we celebrate his birthday. It's all part of a purpose, and the purpose is a good one. It focuses our behavior on a peaceful community, and that is what religion should be all about, should it not? 

That is why, instead of picking fault, we should defend the celebration of Christmas. It really is about peace and good will. We should all look forward to Christmas as a festival where we can briefly forget about the bumps in our personal pathways through life and concentrate on getting together with family and friends for a bit of holiday cheer, good food and good will. That is far more important than the gifts and the holiday glitz, but those are an important part of this festival as well.

There's nothing wrong with giving and receiving things we want or need. Christmas mythology says that practice was started by the three wise men presenting their gifts to the baby Jesus. It was perpetuated by an early Saint Nicholas who is alleged to have slipped gold coins into the footwear of girls in needy families to fatten up their dowries. Apparently, back then, it wasn't easy to marry off daughters without a bribe.

In today's social consciousness, an old guy slipping coins to young girls in the night would probably be seen as a potential child molester and be taken to task by some politically-appointed human rights tribunal. Still, Nicholas was seen as a saint with ideas beneficial to the community in the silly old social consciousness of the early Christian era.

The business of giving was reinforced in an insightful story by Charles Dickens about an old miser who valued wealth above all else. It was further enhanced in America in a nicely crafted poem about a fat little elf arriving in a miniature sleigh towed by eight tiny reindeer and descending down a chimney with a bag full of goodies for the children. 

Of course, today's Santa Claus is no longer a fat little elf catering to small people. Like almost everyone else on this continent, he has grown to enormous proportions.

Instead of celebrating this aspect of the holiday as an opportunity to show people we love and care for that we love them and care for them, the people in our society who appear to harbor very limited capacity for peace and good will dismiss it all as nothing more than a commercial operation propelled by greed.

It is that, too, but is that so bad? Thousands of Ma and Pa businesses everywhere in the Christian world survive only because someone out there buys their goodies at Christmas time. Without that, they would have to fold and probably go on the dole. Millions of people are kept employed manufacturing things we don't necessarily need, but which we buy anyway on this occasion.

Without Christmas, about 80 percent of the Arts and Crafts industry would be wiped out and the chocolate supply network would undergo massive layoffs. Thriving evergreen tree farms and poinsettia nurseries would go out of business.

Giving the people in the northern hemisphere where it all began something to anticipate at the onset of the darkest days of the year indicates a clear grasp of the vagaries of human nature by the early Christian spin doctors. Instead of reducing our activities to cower in our hovels near the fire behind shuttered windows as the days grow progressively shorter, colder and darker, the Christian take on the festival of the winter solstice gives us something to look forward to.

Lighting candles and stringing up lights everywhere gives participants the feeling that they are actually doing something to ward off the gathering gloom. Symbolically, it provides the opportunity for us to dispel the onset of darkness by lighting a small candle or a string of lights. 

We do not know for sure if this is where the sage advice, "Rather than curse the dark, light a small candle" came from, but there should be no surprise if it did.

Which Witch is Which

Hallowe'en has been passed down to us from antiquity. It was one of the ancient festivals important to people struggling to survive the seasonal cycles. It was part of their beliefs, referred to as The Old Religions by the people who set out to propagate new religions. 

Those who resisted conversion to new faiths were portrayed in a negative light very much in the manner modern politicians are trying to portray each other to gain favour at the polls. That's probably how these old pagans became witches and how witches became evil.

It would appear that among our ancestors a couple of thousand years ago were those who did not idly sit around waiting for someone to invent new religions for them. They carried on celebrating the festivities to mark the seasonal cycles. 

Today, we still observe these festivals as the sanitized and politically corrected versions of Christmas, Easter, the summer solstice and Hallowe'en. 

There can be little doubt that some form of witchcraft has been a fact of life in every early culture right from its beginnings, but modern media hype has reduced the witch to about the same level of credibility as the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.  

These attempts to make witches irrelevant 
worked, but not too well. Witchcraft has not entirely disappeared. I had personal contact with it before the middle of the 20th Century when I was too young to even give it a thought or talk about it. Now, as I look back over the events of my life, I see my own experience with witches was an ordinary event that lacked the excitement that we have come to expect in the pages of literature. Here's how it went.

When I was about 5 years old, I developed runny ears. It was an inner ear infection, a common enough ailment in the days of log-and-clay cabin walls, no central heating or ventilation, outdoor toilets, excessive tobacco smoke and poor sanitation. 

My parents decided to take me to a local witch baba who had a reputation for dealing with such matters. The people of East European background I grew up with in rural Saskatchewan referred to the healing (good) witches as Witch Babas. In those cultures, Baba is almost a universal term for Grandma.

The bad witches who caused cows to stop lactating or the hens to stop laying were called the Witch Widmas (phonetic).

Another category of witches who were believed to cast evil spells (chari) were referred to as Chariwnitzas. So were witches real? Yes indeed. They were as real as you and I.

It was a witch Baba my parents took me to see. The woman tore an old pillow case into strips, soaked them in melted paraffin and wound them around a spindle to form a pair of tapered tubes less than a foot long. She then produced scissors and proceeded to snip off the pointy end of the tubes to make sure there was a clear passage. Positioning my head on a pillow with left ear up, she stuck the thin end into the ear canal, struck a wooden match to light a hand-rolled cigarette before igniting the other end of the tube.

While she sat there, quietly sucking on the cigarette, the tube burned slowly, creating an oddly warm sensation deep inside my skull. I'm not sure, but I think I felt better after both ears were treated like that. I might have even dozed off. When you're four or five years old, you really haven't much information to compare things with, so it's hard to tell how well it worked. But here I am today, on my 82nd orbit of the Sun and, while my hearing has grown quite selective over the years, I still hear as much as I need or want to without electronic aids in a noisy city environment.

My parents didn't take me to a real doctor because it was the depth of the Great Depression and there wasn't much money available for such frills as certificated medical attention. And even if they had, the results probably would have been a tonsillectomy or the removal of some other easily accessible part of the lymphatic system that was unlikely to cause too much long-term damage. The tonsillectomy was a popular operation in those days and no doubt generated much ready cash for the cash-strapped medics of the day.  

That was my personal experience with witches. A few years later in school, I saw a friend have his warts removed by a witch baba. This kid's hands were so warty that he sat on them just to avoid people's stares. Popular wisdom at the time was that it was possible to contract warts simply by handling toads. Since there was no shortage of toads for us to play with in the Prairie environment, this was easy to believe.

One day he confided in me that his mother had an appointment to take him to see a local witch baba on the night of the full moon. Sure enough, the moon waxed, the deed was done and my friend came to school with ordinary hands, still not terribly clean, but with nice, pink patches where the warts had been only a week earlier, and which he proudly showed off to anyone who asked to see.

Curious, I asked him how it was done. He described a scene that involved an open fire, toothpicks, a pot of melted paraffin, gestures with a large scary-looking knife, and much low-pitched mumbling. I assumed that it was an incantation or some weird mumbo-jumbo like that. There was, and still is, much discussion to the effect that warts are suggestible.

It is fairly common knowledge that in all cultures, witches were the apothecaries, reputed to be well versed in the wisdom of the healing arts and the local flora that provided the healing potions that people needed to get them through their illnesses, real or imagined. It is possible that their well-recorded successes attest to the fact that many illnesses have a strong imaginary component. That is why there is a lot of medical research going on into the placebo effect right now, but that's another story.

These people were the direct forebears of our modern vitamin shops that sell you pills and potions for just about every physical deficiency you can imagine. Their rate of success and failure could be measured by the statistic that in some cultures, one had about a 50 percent chance of reaching adulthood. What that percentage might have been without the witches we can only speculate on. It ought to be mentioned here that the proof of the 50 percent figure seems a good estimate when one checks out the grave markers in the abandoned old cemeteries which seem to be populated heavily by children.

There was a darker side to witchcraft. The witches were expected to perform a function which every community needed and nobody wanted to talk about because it was controversial even then: abortion.

It is generally understood that many of these women were very skilled in that function. Knowledge of the local flora and fauna gave them the materials they needed to do the job effectively without endangering the lives of the women involved any more than they needed to. Popular wisdom has it that their traditional skills made the modern abortionists wielding the equivalent of coat hangers and vacuum cleaners look like fumbling amateurs by comparison.

It is also this function that got the witches into trouble. Being in possession of knowledge of whose wives and daughters of local officialdom needed their services no doubt resulted in many of those witch burnings we read so much about. It is also probable that this was where some of the more grotesque and unbelievable mythology involving association with the Devil originated to justify the burnings in the eyes of the rest of the community.

Witchcraft has been romanticized and demonized by the tellers of tall tales both in folklore as well as print after Herr Gutenberg developed the means to mass produce writing, but the truth is, the practitioners of the "Black Arts" were valued members of every community throughout the known world. They wouldn't have been there if their services were not needed.

Clearly, the witches were as vital to our ancestors in every community as were the brewers, the bakers, the blacksmiths, the cartwrights, wheelwrights, the coopers, millers, farmers, gardeners, tailors, thatchers, etc.

A woman who is said to have filled the role of witch in our community in Saskatchewan during the early part of the 20th Century practiced her craft secretively from a log cabin set near a road in a dense poplar bush lot near the edge of town. By the time I was old and big enough to ride my bicycle along the trail to the nearest general store, she was no longer there, but her reputation lived on.

A series of small mounds near the abandoned and decaying log cabin were said to be where she had buried some of her handiwork. It is possible that those tiny mounds were nothing more than piles of dirt pushed up by tunneling blue-assed moles which infested the prairie farmland, but our local tellers of tall tales hinted they were otherwise, especially around Hallowe'en. That was enough to discourage our hanging around that abandoned log cabin in the woods any more than we absolutely needed to. 

That is how rural as well as urban communities functioned in the days when people were valued for demonstrable skills, not simply for that certificate on the wall.

We don't know how many witch Babas were awarded the Order of Canada for what they did, but there is much speculation that they had a hand in promoting the award to the late abortionist, Dr. Henry Morgentaler.

This man was lucky he practised his craft in a hyper-permissive social consciousness. In another time, he might have run the risk of premature cremation.

From Chaos to Maturity

Ma and Pa Robin built a nest in our front walkway. No doubt weighing the odds, they decided we were less dangerous than the crows surveying the area from the rooftops and the racoons and skunks patrolling the lower levels. 

We paused to look into the nest each time we walked by, at first counting the aqua blue eggs, then the chicks as they hatched.

It didn't last long. The little guys went from downy fuzz to pinfeathers in a little more than a week and flew away in three weeks. Sure, they were clumsy at first, hitting branches and tree trunks, but it was clear that Mother Nature equipped them for survival as young birds.

How different from human children. We are totally dependent on our parents far longer than the infants of any other species. Most other mammals and birds have grown into independent adulthood by about the time that we master the ability to totter along in a bipedal posture and begin to communicate verbally. It takes much longer to make a human being.

We are born equipped only with a set of genetics carrying an array of basic bodily functions, inherited predispositions, and infinite potential. It takes some time before the human child's mind begins to recognize the differences between places and faces, names and numbers. All that is achieved through interaction with others and educational programming beginning at home and evolving through a system of schools.

Some of us emerge from the chaos of childhood at a faster rate than others, but overall, the conversion from a chaotic to an organized mind set is slow and takes all of our lives, and while the distance we evolve may be compared, it is never complete.  

Our rate of learning is most rapid in early childhood. That is because we have such a great distance to go to be brought up to speed in the prevailing state of social consciousness. There is such a concentration of new experiences that the passage of time seems to take forever. A human being has the potential to never stop learning, but as the number of new experiences diminishes, the perceived passage of time accelerates in direct ratio.

It is painful for many people to look back over the times of their lives because of the things they did or did not do because of the things they did not know. On the other hand, there are those people who say, wistfully, "Oh, if only I could go back to being 18 again ."

Difference between these two groups is that the first have fully functional memory that allows them to view the prospect of being 18 again as a return to a chaotic period full of new experiences, both memorable and scary, situations they did not know how to handle, foolish pursuits and mental excursions up dead-end streets. 

My parents, like good parents everywhere, did their best to guide my way to avoid the pitfalls they had experienced on their own routes to maturity. Typically, like children everywhere, I was about as receptive to their advice as the little characters in the late Charles Schultz's excellent Peanuts animations where the adult voices come through as a sort of background nasal drone, completely devoid of any actual message.

It is not accidental. It is a natural adaptation that favors evolutionary development. There would be no generation of new ideas if all of the old ideas were accepted immediately without question. 

It is the same principle as the natural occurrence of mutations and wide genetic variations to weight the odds in favor of survival of some organisms in times of widespread microbial, physical or any other kind of attack. It is the biological binary code at work. It is Mother Nature's personal insurance policy for the survival of the species. 

Of the thousands of great new ideas conceived by each up-and-coming generation, 99 percent will vaporize in the cold light of reality, but the few ideas that do survive will be integrated into the development of the social consciousness to be built upon as conditions change. 

Some ideas will survive a few years. These are the ones that happen to be particularly relevant to the state of consciousness that happens to be in existence at the time. Few will survive a full generation or the emergence of the next distinct level of social consciousness. Fewer still will be permanently embedded into the set of social parameters that define our species.

That is how our level of social perceptions evolves as each new generation tries out new modes of behavior, new technology, new ways of thinking--anything just to do things differently from the way their stodgy old parents did it. 

In the past, this has produced mods, beatniks, hippies, flower children, nazis, communists, and every other kind of youthful sub-culture. Currently, we have to cope with Goths, rappers, hip hoppers, skinheads, vegetarians, vegans, human environmental degradation alarmists, construction boot feminists, rainbow coalitionists, animal rights activists, and other curiosities emerging out of the most convoluted corners of juvenile minds.

This includes the youths who wear the crotch of their pants down between their knees, display posterior cleavage and remind us of sloppily dressed penguins as they waddle by.

But let us not forget the chaos of youth also produced Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the rest of the bright minds behind the electronic revolution. These men were just kids when they emerged upon the electronic scene. 

And what about Andrew Lloyd Webber, a musical genius unparalleled in the modern world and Andre Rieu, musical entertainment that does not grate mercilessly upon our auditory senses? Apparently, Rieu just couldn't see himself as being just another violinist in yet another symphony orchestra.

There is an upside to chaotic thinking. It is not all downside. It produces creativity. Creativity can be described as a ball taking an unusual bounce; a new way to do something; charting an unexpected course; viewing something from yet another angle. Trouble with creativity is that it quite often skirts the boundaries of reality and is not always adaptable to current conditions. 

Not all creativity has a realistic purpose. Some of it, unfortunately, is just too far out to have any useful application. The only way such creativity can survive is when it is supported by some government agency being overly generous with money they extract from the taxpaying public. It's when politicians vote financial support for "the arts" in trolling for votes among the clutching, fumbling and bumbling masses.

When the politicians do that, are they really leveraging the money they extort out of the working taxpayers to support the arts, or are they simply perpetuating mediocrity?

How about those robins? As I walk around the corner to the convenience store in Upper Oakville Mall for the paper each morning, there are robins keeping pace, hopping along the sidewalk almost within reach. These birds do not display the cautious behavior of ordinary birds. Are they the little guys who hatched in the mailbox in our entrance way? I like to think so.

The God Issue

The God issue:

There's a lot of discussion out there in the media on whether or not there's a God. It's the usual sparring match between the high priests of religion and the high priests of science. Everybody has an opinion and nobody has a satisfactory answer.

Problem with this debate is that there are strong indications that many of the debaters still see God as an old guy with flowing white beard and a halo or nimbus surrounding the bald spot. It's an old picture, but it's one that will have to do until a better one is posted.

Long ago, when tribal elders first undertook to introduce a little predictability into the affairs of their communities, the old guy with flowing white hair and whiskers was a good image. He might have been one of the elders, a source of wisdom and full of experience, a benefit to the more chaotic end of the community spectrum, whose members were too busy with the pursuit of sex and success to take the time to think things through.

This is no longer the case today. Science has made great strides. Charles Darwin has re-defined the story of Creation, altering it from a week-long event to an ongoing process. We now see creation as the process of Natural Selection that keeps unfolding even as we speak. 

Isaac Newton gave us insights into gravity. Albert Einstein gave us insights into temporal relationships and Steven Hawking is exploring the cosmos for us. All of these are worthy undertakings.

Einstein thought he could gather the celestial clockwork into one simple mathematical equation. He was going to call it the Theory of Everything. Hawking, today's High Priest of Science, is trying to do the same with cosmology.

Another scientist, Polish-born Benoit Mandelbrot, comes closer to mathematically outlining an all-encompassing reality with his work with fractals. Other learned types talk about strings, a marginally-comprehensible theory about the nature of matter on a sub-atomic scale. It would appear that so far,  life's physical realities resist being gathered into a neat mathematical equation.

Nuclear physicists working on the Cern project in Switzerland are looking for the God particle by studying the debris from particle collisions in their giant accelerator.

Astronomers, working with incredibly refined optics, are looking deeper and deeper into space and farther and farther back in time. Each time they encounter another mystery, they postulate another hypothesis to try to explain what they are seeing. There's all kinds of speculation, but so far, they cannot explain effects they labelled dark matter and dark energy.

Isn't that what the biblical scribes were doing when they put together the scriptures? Encountering gaps in their knowledge, they used their imaginations every time they ran into another problem that defied explanation.

Neither the people looking for God nor the ones looking for the God particle have anything more than theories to offer us at the moment, but neither can define God because God is a concept. He's a concept we all need in order to make our everyday lives easier to navigate. 

Many people will keep God around because they need someone to thank when things go right, someone to blame when things go wrong and someone to appeal to for help when all other avenues of appeal have been exhausted.

It is also fair to expect that the more science delves into the mysteries of the universe, the closer we come to a better understanding of God. Like personal maturity, the search is open-ended. It can be compared, but it is never complete.