Christmas 2008
Dear Friends,
During the Christmas season of 1843 Charles Dickens published a little book he called, A Christmas Carol. That wasn’t his first choice for a title. He originally called it Sledgehammer, because he meant the story to hit you over the head. By the time he published it; he had toned down his attitude a bit and wrote,
I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
Well, apparently the book put a lot of people in good humor. It sold 6,000 copies in the first week, and it has since gone on to become one of the most widely read Christmas stories of all time. More important, the book seemed to have struck a chord about the true meaning of Christmas. As the English poet Thomas Hood noted a year later, “If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease.”
I find myself asking, why does this story of the old Ebenezer Scrooge capture our affection so readily? After all, the story is, as Dickens intended, a sledgehammer. When Scrooge faces Marley’s ghost, and then the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and To Come, we are meant to feel fear in our guts for our own misspent pasts, unpromising presents, and questionable futures.
In his journey into remembrance with Christmas Past Scrooge sees his dead sister Fan. She had treated him with kindness and had rescued him from a bad boarding school. Indeed, it is her death that had turned him sour. But now Scrooge sees himself when he recently treated her surviving son very badly. He sees one of his workers throwing a generous party at which everyone is having a good time, and conversely he sees his pecuniary treatment of his clerk, Bob Cratchit. Most painful of all, he sees the love of his life, Belle, whom he left behind because of his greater love for money.
The ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to the celebrations happening in various homes. People are enjoying themselves. People are talking about Scrooge, and even as some of them deride the old miser, they care about him. His sister’s son even believes that Scrooge will change one day. Scrooge cannot help but notice how much better people are willing to think of him than he is of them. But Christmas Present isn’t through with Scrooge. He must first see Tiny Tim and then many other families living in abject poverty. Finally he sees two children, Ignorance and Want. With a sledgehammer Scrooge is faced with the harm that such poverty causes and the fact that his stinginess could help alleviate it.
The ghost of Christmas To Come shows Scrooge the Cratchit’s house. The family is bereft. Tiny Tim has died because he could not get the care he needed. Then Scrooge sees his own end. No one cares that he’s dead. His possessions have been looted. His life has not mattered to anyone; it is as though he had never existed.
Weeping, Scrooge awakens from his dreams to discover they all occurred in one night. It is Christmas morning. There is time to repent. And of course he does. He becomes a convivial, generous old man who lives and dies much beloved.
Again I ask, why do we find such a story so disarming? What made it so popular in 1843 and makes it remain so even now?
In the end, the answer may be very simple. Peter Gomes is often quoted to say that the compelling heart of the Gospel, the real Good News, is the message that we don’t have to remain as we are. While most of us aren’t miserly millionaires, Scrooge is a compelling archetype for what the Apostle Paul says are the things we ought to have done but have not, and the things that ought not have done but have. I suspect that the journey with Scrooge’s Christmas ghosts is a journey most of us know and fear.
A Christmas Carol, like the story of Christmas itself, invites us to face ourselves. We’re the greedy Scrooge. We’re the lusting-after-power Herod. We’re the not-paying-attention innkeeper, and maybe we’re a lot of other things, too. But it doesn’t have to be this way, the stories tell us. We can become the generous Scrooge. We can jump for joy out of our sleepy midnight, like the shepherds. We can come over mountains and deserts following hope promised by something as ephemeral as a star, like the Magi.
But let’s be honest with one another. It is a fearful thing to fully face ourselves in all our human frailty, to be sure. But it’s also a fearful thing to think of changing. As much as we may fear to truly face ourselves, in changing a part of our identity dies, and that’s just as scary. T. S. Eliot’s Magi claim that a part of them died in Bethlehem. They seem to find that idea unsettling. As they think about the perplexing irony, they finally conclude that they would welcome another such death. These stories, then, tell us not only that we don’t have to be the way we are, but they also tell us that when we die to the way we are, we will welcome both the loss and the gain.
Why do we love these stories so? Is it not because they release us from our double-bind, our double-fear of either staying the same or changing? Is it not because they throw us into our deepest fears and then fill the air with angels singing, “Fear not! Fear not, for I bring you good news of great joy”? Is it not because sometimes it takes a sledgehammer to set us free?
I wish your Christmas to be a blessing, and perhaps even frightful and freeing,
Dudley
