AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - X

[Continuing our reading of and meditations on The Christmas Carol]:
         

          The Ghost of Christmas Present has a sharp and pointed sense of humor: he has to in order to bear with Scrooge’s inverted hierarchy of values, what he thinks matters and doesn’t.  In that sense, he is not unlike our God, who likewise bears with us despite our pretensions that His thoughts are not ours nor His ways ours (Is 55:8-9).  In the movie version of the Carol, he frequently laughs: a healthy person is one who does not take himself too seriously.

          After leaving the Cratchits, the Ghost conducts Scrooge to his nephew’s place.  Stingy Scrooge is the great unspoken in the Cratchit household (but for Mrs. Cratchit’s momentary outburst).  He’s the butt of gentle jokes at his nephew’s.  They can afford to be more indulgent because the consequences of his moral disorder are less existential for them.  Here, too, charity tempers ill-will: Scrooge’s nephew voices his intent to keep on inviting Scrooge to Christmas dinner, no matter how much he expects the invitation to be declined.  Hope springs eternal.  Like Christ, he intends to keep knocking at the closed door, in hope it will someday open. 

          Holman Hunt’s famous painting, “The Light of the World,” dates from about a decade after the Carol.  It depicts Jesus standing, lantern in hand, knocking at a closed door, clearly alluding to Rev 3:20.  That door could very well be Scrooge’s – and many of ours.  Look carefully at the painting.  It’s clear that door hasn’t been opened in a while.  There’s no apparent window to look out of to see who’s knocking.  And the weeds grown up in front of it suggest it’s been long closed. But Our Lord knocks.

          After Scrooge’s nephew’s house, the Ghost conducts Scrooge to many unknown places: the cottage of a miner (the Carol was written in part in response to the situation of child labor in tin mines); a lighthouse tended by two keepers; a ship at sea.  In the movie version, they arrive at an encampment outside of town where an unemployed father separates himself from the family fire, urging his wife to take children and go to the poorhouse, with some implication he may kill himself.  That is not the family way; it is the coward’s way.  It’s why, in his poem about Peter’s denial of Jesus, the Polish poet Roman Brandstaetter has a devil sing about Peter: “you who distance yourself from the fire,” alluding to his discomfort at the fire in the High Priest’s courtyard.

          Before they depart, there’s one last scene.  Scrooge thinks the Ghost is concealing something under his robes.  The Ghost parts them to reveal two starving, emaciated children – a boy and a girl, Ignorance and Want.  They gnaw at the Christmas spirit.  Scrooge asks their paternity: “Spirit, are they yours?”  The answer is terse: “They are man’s!”

          The history of human existence is one that seeks to consign to God the consequences of man’s doing: although humans introduced sin into the world, they demand an “all-powerful God” eliminate it.  Neither justice nor reality can allow that.  Justice cannot, because he who is responsible for a mess is responsible for cleaning it up.  That’s what the message of Christmas – of God made man “who dwelt among us” – is.  Reality cannot, because the consequence of freedom is that man can fail.  To “ensure” that only good comes out of man’s choices is either to negate freedom (and thus make man a robot) or responsibility (and thus make man less than a man, unaccountable for his acts).  Ignorance and want are among human products; Scrooge, like man in general, would like them to “go away,” without admitting to paternity.  Sin is the first attempt at absent fatherhood.

Shocked by the two, Scrooge wants them to be hidden.  The Ghost obliges, cautioning Scrooge that just because they are concealed does not mean they have gone away.  Deny their existence and “I see that written which is Doom.”

This time, there’s no return home for a nap.  The departure of the Ghost of Christmas Present rolls into the arrival of the Ghost of Christmas Future.  In the film version, there’s a brief interlude, as the former leaves Scrooge alone to contemplate where his life is.  In a sense, it’s a prelude to eternity, where man also stands alone before his life.  In this life, the future constantly rolls into the present: when it ceases, eternity begins. 

Roughly two weeks before Christmas, where is my life at present?  How do I stand in my relations with others?  Myself?  Family?  Friends?  Co-workers or employees?  Other people?  God?  And since the present is the one moment where change is possible, what am I going to do based on what I see?