In the beginning of “A Christmas Carol,” just before Marley’s ghost departs, a window slowly opens in Scrooge’s sitting room revealing an awful scene in the streets below. As most of the “Scrooge” movies have it, there’s a bunch of ghosts flying around (it is a ghost story after all), mourning in Marley’s fashion, many of whom Scrooge recognizes.
I know of one hollywood rendition that attempts to unpack what’s illustrated in the book, but most skip over it entirely. If the movies had it right, this scene would be unforgettable, but few moviegoers are aware of it.
In a nutshell, the ghosts are trying to help the poor but are no longer able. In death, they see and feel the plight of humanity but can’t do anything about it. In life they had more power than anyone else to ease humanity’s suffering, now mourning the fools they were, and the suffering that stands as a result.
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost… Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ancle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.
Maybe Hollywood skips over this because it’s too difficult to render.
Either way, this scene defines the book’s message: Scrooge’s problem isn’t that he’s stingy, or that he doesn’t care about the poor and needs to get his act together. There is a day of reckoning coming for the old man, one where he’ll be reconciled with humanity, as his ghostly comrades were, and will mourn the loss of his mothballed earthly power. This very short book isn’t about money, or benevolence, or helping the poor. It’s about power, the forces that convince us to hoard it, and the personal violence that comes as a result.
The Bible addresses this as well; power is, at least, a major theme in both the Old and New Testaments. In these, God has given humanity some impressive abilities to do a bunch of things that He could very well do on His own. In addition, he’s allowed an equally immense amount of freedom to do with our power as we wish. We can pump it unfettered into the lives of others, or keep it entirely for ourselves, and all points in between.
What we do or don’t do with it will have an enormous impact on who we become, regardless of what we believe about God, how often we read our Bibles, live a “moral” life, etc.
And so the Bible is rife with stories, parables, propositions, and ourtright commandments in the hope that we’ll do what’s right, or, “righteous” as it’s so often put, with the power that’s been alotted to us. As Dickens has suggested, there is a day coming when we’ll see things much more clearly, more intimately connected with humanity than we could ever imagine – an impossible oneness – forever redefining for us the proper use of our reach.
The idea that God would give us mortals any power at all is fascinating to me, while I’m also left scratching my head, wondering why we can’t have more. The God who can do anything He wants put a very large fence around what we can and can’t do, then sent His son to walk around for a bit, showing us that there’s something on the other side.
For now, we’re forced to be happy with the way things are.
But we want more, not because of some character flaw, or from our tendency towards selfishness, but because we were made for more. The lust for power doesn’t begin with an absence of moral purity, it begins with a desire that God placed in all of us. Sure, we can corrupt it, spending our entire existence scratching and scraping for what will never amount to more than a few scraps, relatively speaking. For those of us who get suckered into that, there will be plenty of errant philosophies and behaviors that will attend our journey, as it did for Scrooge. But at the base of it all will be a very good, holy desire. For now, there’s a hedge. We can’t have the power that we want.
There is however a hole in the fence, a singular place where limitations don’t exist.
Humanity.
We can give, love, sacrifice, reconcile, heal, etc. all we want. And it doesn’t leave us with feelings of futility and emptiness, nor does it launch us onto a trajectory where people no longer matter, where our singular pursuit is the only thing that has weight and glory. There are no give-aholics, or, barring a few exceptions, people who have destroyed their lives helping others. There certainly aren’t any stories written about someone who’s been overthrown by benevolence, visited by four spirits in the night who convince him to reconsider.
Maybe we can’t fly, or make things appear out of thin air, but we can operate nearly unfettered here, with all the power we need to move mountains.
But we frequently don’t. We’re not interested in this kind of power, though we own it in heaps and mounds. Dickens offers some insights into why, launching Scrooge upon an oddyssey in every sense of the word, illustrating for the reader what happened to the old man and how he got so far removed from who he was and the power he possessed.
At the end, he is reclaimed, as the first spirit promised he would be, like a ship that’s been uncapsized, or an old, rundown building that’s been put back to rights.
He then made bold to inquire what business brought [the first Spirit] there. “Your welfare!” said the Ghost. Scrooge expressed himself much obliged, but could not help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been more conducive to that end. The Spirit must have heard him thinking, for it said immediately: “Your reclamation, then.”
But this required, among other things, that Scrooge revisit his best and worst memories: abandonment as a child, the day his love walked away, a grand party at Fezzywig’s; formative moments that his love of gain had forever evicted, supplanted by a large lump of nothingness. Freed from these, Scrooge was left at large to become a zombie of sorts, utterly unattached to the weight, glory, and plight of humanity, his own included.
Standing in these memories at an intimate distance forced Ebenezer to revisit the pain, loss, and joy that he had forgotten, reconciling himself in a way that didn’t allow much room for finance. Instead of sitting through a verly long lecture on the evils of greed, Scrooge was taken on a journey that shook the scales off of this particular sin, showing it for what it is. In the true presence of humanity, our bullshit tends to catch fire.
I can’t help thinking that a similar visitation might do me some good, too.
I’m no Scrooge. My past is filled with moments where I’ve managed to help, connect, give, sacrifice, etc. But I’m not entirely unlike him, struggling to see the good in people because I can’t see past the bad. This hasn’t served me well – the older I get, the fewer the humans who live up to my standards.
Oddly, my good memories seem to be fading as well – the “Christmas past” department of my mind seems more filled with all the things that went wrong: awkward moments, a few episodes where I was laughed at in public or picked on at school, multiple betrayals, bad decisions. Epic mistakes.
I have only vague recollections of the good things: mentors and friends who sacrificed on my behalf, adventures from my aviation days, leadership successes, surfing with Jeff and Rafa, people I’ve led and mentored, memories from my childhood, best friends, parties, every single Christmas, that time I officiated a wedding at Beaver Creek ski resort and spent nearly the whole reception fielding unsolicited, very sincere complements. I’ve done plenty of weddings, none were like this. For some reason, I don’t spend much time here. Seems like folly to me.
I read “A Christmas Carol” every year and am ever more concerned that I might be experiencing a bit of Scrooge’s mustard. What kind of journey am I on that’s left me more amnesious and judgmental than last year?
What have I evicted that’s cleared such a large space for these nothings?
Am I in need of a Scrooge-level reclamation?
While I spend plenty of time ruminating on myriad bad memories, I won’t admit the pain. They only get enough space to remind me that this world is a dangerous place, that I have to protect myself, and that, in the end, I’m the only one I can trust.
That was Scrooge’s predicament, according to his soon-to-be ex girlfriend:
“You fear the world too much… All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”
In our defense, this is what happens when traumatic moments aren’t handled correctly. They soon take over. Maybe that’s why the first ghost thought it so important for Scrooge to revisit them.
It reminds me of what happens in a bad marriage. The infractions that are sure to happen in every marriage aren’t reconciled, so they’re left to pile upon each other until the good can no longer be accessed. Given enough time, the couple becomes convinced that there’s nothing left, though it’s still there, just buried.
I have to assume that something similar is happening in my soul, and I’m left convinced that this might be my best opportunity for growth over the next ~ 363 days. But the difference between Scrooge and myself is that there isn’t anyone to force or frighten me into such a revisitation. These memories, good and bad, are painful, excruciatingly so in some cases. I don’t want to go, and probably won’t.
So, because I’m a Christian of sorts, and because I’ve experienced the crazy side of God enough to believe that more is possible, I’ve asked for something similar; maybe not ghosts and all, but some reconnection with the parts of me that have been shelved in favor of something much less human.
Image courtesy of SwapnIl Dwivedi at Unsplash
