Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Christmas Changes
The history of Christmas has been something like the “telephone game” we played as children, whispering a sentence from ear to ear and finally ending up with something quite different at the end of the line. Millennia before Christ was even born, people had already been celebrating the winter solstice in late December, as the long nights finally started getting shorter and warmth began to return to the world. The Romans, for example, celebrated this as a tribute to Saturn, the god of agriculture.
Later, when the leaders of the church decided to celebrate the birth of Jesus for the first time (more than three hundred years after the fact), they decided to hold it very close to the date of the Roman “Saturnalia Festival”. Yet while “Christianity had, for the most part, replaced pagan religion” by the Middle Ages, the original form for celebrating Christmas remained very much the same:
“On Christmas, believers attended church, then celebrated raucously in a drunken, carnival-like atmosphere similar to today’s Mardi Gras… The poor would go to the houses of the rich and demand their best food and drink. If owners failed to comply, their visitors would most likely terrorize them with mischief. Christmas became the time of year when the upper classes could repay their real or imagined “debt” to society by entertaining less fortunate citizens1”
In fact, the modern form of Christmas (in the spirit of Silent Night) was very much an invention of the American upper class in the mid-nineteenth century. It sought to put out the raucousness of the event and prevent additional “Christmas riots”.
Now that another hundred years have gone by, the winter solstice is no longer immediately relevant to modern life and the old form of celebration is well forgotten. Yet America’s economic growth spurt of the twentieth century has consolidated another change: the commemoration of the birth of Christ has become the most significant incentive to go shopping that mankind has ever known. A culture has sprung up where gift-giving (and lots of it) is both a pivotal way to show your love for friends and family as well as a massive influx of fuel to the international money machine2.
Here in China, the youth may give each other small gifts, but there is nothing on the scale of America’s massive shopping spree. Instead, Christmas in China feels like a low-key version of America’s New Year’s Day. People use it as an reason to go do something fun, to whatever extent is within their means.
On Christmas eve for example, my high school students have a regular day of classes and then arrange for parties to be held in each classroom in the evening. A wealthier friend of mine goes out with her family to a karaoke restaurant, where they can spend the whole night eating, drinking and singing. Chinese may or may not know something about Jesus, but generally, their Christmas has nothing to do with Christ.
A faithful Christian may be saddened by all this, and sincerely protest that Jesus is supposed to be at the center of Christmas. Yet, since Jesus’s birth was actually put into this holiday long after it was established, is it wrong for other cultures to take him out of it again? Indeed—how might Jesus have celebrated his own birthday, and how would he have asked us to celebrate it today?
1 From the “History Channel” web-feature devoted to Christmas.
2 See also this article on the history of Christmas (archived at Looksmart.com’s “Find Articles”
, with a specific reference to the “Christmas economy.”
China • Way of Life • Religion • (41) Trackbacks • Permalink
Saturday, December 13, 2003
How Long, How Dark, is the Road to Peace?
Japan is the only country whose constitution prohibits war (as far as I know). Now, however, Japan is planning to send some defensive troops to Iraq to engage in unwarlike activity. Such offshore movement of Japanese forces would have been unthinkable in the past, and many are afraid of what this will bring in the future.
But leaving that fear aside for the time being, I would like to consider the history of how things got to be this way, and show some of the implications it might have for the whole world’s progress toward peace.
Japan used to be the world’s most war-hungry nation, yet after the tragedy of its involvement in the second world war, it went to the opposite extreme. For nearly 50 years now, we have had at least one nation on earth for whom war itself was illegal, according to its own constitution—certainly this was a major breakthrough in the history of humanity.
It is not inconceivable then, that such a change could be brought about on an international scale. The real question is: what measure of horror will finally awaken the human race to the fact of war’s continual failure to bring us good in this world? Have recent wars been enough for us to realize that all nations must be forced by law to work together in peace? Do we require another wake-up call as bloody or worse than what has already happened, or can peace come as a result of the collective efforts of relatively small groups of people to educate the world about the best interests of humanity as a whole?
The last two years since that fateful September day have seen the apparent return of warmongering to the world. The relative international tranquility seems forever shattered, and all the nations are wondering who’s going to preemptively strike who next.
I admit that this may be the beginning of a century that will show us the horrors of war even more clearly than the last, but who can deny that this will give us even more obvious reasons to establish unassailable laws of peace—not only in one nation, but in many?
Eventually, there must come a turning point, at which humankind will have to chose either peace or extinction—and let’s admit it: that’s not such a hard decision to make. Already the choice is clear to some of us, and we would just as soon choose peace now rather than later. How much effort must we dedicate—and how many lives must be sacrificed—before the choice is apparent to the whole world community?
Whether peace is to be reached only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by humanity’s stubborn clinging to old patterns of behaviour, or is to be embraced now by an act of consultative will, is the choice before all who inhabit the earth. At this critical juncture when the intractable problems confronting nations have been fused into one common concern for the whole world, failure to stem the tide of conflict and disorder would be unconscionably irresponsible.(source)
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Worth a Thousand Happy Romances
Many people have advice for me about love. Another teacher who works in my school confided in me one day, telling me how she loved a young man in high school once, but since there was so much pressure for her to focus on her studies, she said nothing to him about her feelings. Later on, she married a different man, and buried in her heart a question that has stayed alive all these years, always asking her what would have happened if she had told that young man about her feelings while she had the chance. She urged me to follow my heart, and when I love a woman, to let her know that I love her.
I confessed to my friend that this might not be a good time for me to talk about my own love story. The last time I actually sat down and told someone any details of my love stories over the last two years, I discovered hot coals of anger hiding in those memories, and the very act of breathing my tale flamed them into a small rage, furious with God for allowing such a string of bad luck to have come to pass. In some cases, my luck has been so bad, so tinged with irony and impossible coincidences, that it seems it could only have happened with the hand of heaven controlling it behind the scenes, purposefully arranging for David’s heart to be crushed several times in a row.
Now this is the part where my good friends tell me, “now David, don’t be so pessimistic. Those girls were not right for you. Surely there’s someone out there, and God just is helping you get ready for her.”
I appreciate their sentiments, and I want to believe them, but then I look around at the world and I wonder: 9 times out of 10, I see people married to someone they are not in love with, often still in love with someone they are not married to. Human lives overflow with regret.
Now the statistician in me gets to work, and starts calculating the odds that David Bowers, resident of Wuxi, China and author of the Brightwind website, will ever meet that mystery Miss Wonderful. He doesn’t think long before looking at me in the mirror over the rims of his glasses and saying, “Don’t get your hopes up.”
“You’d better get used to just being yourself” that face in the mirror tells me, “because you can never guarantee that any other person will ever make you happy.”
Yet good possibilities are always there, waiting in little bubbles to just pop over your head and drop something wonderful into your life. Every day, beautiful things happen, little miracles with heavenly signatures all over them, and yet many conveniently ignore them in determined self-pity.
But that’s where those impossible coincidences come in. You can see heavenly signatures on the bad things as well as the good when you realize how far most things are out of your control. Limitations are part of the very fabric we are made of, like a ray of light which can go on forever in one direction, but never in two at once.
To realize this is to admit that the joy of life is not in the happily-ever-after fairy tale we’ve been taught to believe. We so often expect that some great event or accomplishment will “make us truly happy” only to realize that we are still the same person after the big day has come and gone.
Some things don’t really matter then: perhaps you are reading this article as a happily married person, or perhaps you are struggling through every day of your marriage just to keep on going. Perhaps you have just fallen deeply in love with someone, or perhaps you have just been deeply hurt. Either way, you are yourself, and the one person that can never go away is you.
Our little rays of light speeding through the dark vacuum of time are limited in every way but one: straight ahead. Our bodies will eventually fall apart just as they were gradually put together, yet we will not fall apart with them. These rays of light, which we are, cannot be divided into pieces, analyzed or decomposed.
Indeed, we can only shine brighter, and we will always find our greatest joy in shining, as brilliantly as the sun, on whoever we are given to shine upon. A single act of genuine kindness is worth a thousand happy romances.
What do you think? If you have something to say on the subject (and I imagine you do), please leave a comment below.
David's Life • Love • Way of Life • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Friday, December 05, 2003
No Words to Describe It.
Although I majored in religious studies in College, I found that the most spiritually inspiring class was Astronomy 101: Stars, Galaxies and Cosmology. Each class was a slide show of the most beautiful photography available to the human race, and each picture dared us to believe that such massive and beautiful things could exist.
Possibly the best-known astronomer in America was Carl Sagan. He crafted words which brought the universe down to the earth for anyone to understand. Through him, the vast complexity of the heavens seemed at once awesome and intimate. His sensitivity to the beauty of the universe had a very spiritual quality. It moved him in his soul, and he was able to make it move others the same way.
In the film Contact, based on Sagan’s novel of the same name, Jodie Foster’s lead character is able to go out and meet the universe on humanity’s behalf. There is a moment in which we watch her as her watery eyes gaze into the stars, and she exclaims in a shocked breath, “Some celestial event… no… no words to describe it!... Poetry!... They should have sent a poet! So beautiful!... beautiful!.... I had no idea!”
Until now, I have found only one artist whose portrayal of the stars—indeed, with no words to describe them—adequately reflects the wonder of Carl Sagan’s vision. His work is so astounding that it makes me wonder: perhaps they should have sent a painter.
Greg Martin depicts planets colliding with one another, stars peeking out from behind the worlds, and nebulas erupting with color. He confronts you with the beauty of a world’s destruction, and seems to stop time at sudden moments of light in the ageless darkness of the universe.
Both Carl Sagan and Greg Martin have been able to see the human spirit reflected in the sky. Each burst of light is at once the brief span of a human life, and all the timeless potential with which it is endowed.
Thursday, December 04, 2003
3 Interesting Resources
These days I’m battling a head cold… my whole world feels a little bit dizzy and slower than everyone else’s. Even though it has all but arrested my brain, I still entertain high dreams for this website.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with everything from the style of the content I write for Brightwind to the style of the page itself. On the days that I haven’t been posting to this site, I’ve been rearranging everything for it on my computer. I’m also planning to expand it in a number of ways. I hope to be able to have everything ready soon.
But until my brain is back to a real functioning condition, I thought I would share the following interesting websites with you:
“WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together.”
“Metafilter is a weblog that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to. A typical weblog is one person posting their thoughts on the unique things they find on the web. This website exists to break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members.”
“Jugglezine: An unassuming e-zine about balancing work and life.”
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