Another friend
asked the other day what people’s favourite Christmas horror film was, I think
he was being a little “Bah humbuggy” himself. I thought about it and suggested initially
“Gremlins” in the end though I decided on Dickens “A Christmas Carol”. Now of
course it is really a ghost story, more than a horror one, but hey that is
splitting hairs. In this incredible story we see the full spirit of Christmas,
the extremes, the many spirits in all of us and of course the possibility of
redemption, that the spirit at the heart of Christmas can still transform our
lives, if we just open our senses and let it
Dickens, like
everyone was a complex character, he had an incredible way of speaking of the heart
of his time and like all great story tellers the heart of all time, the universal.
He also had a magical way of both naming and describing the characters in his
tales. I Love the following description of Scrooge from the second page of “A Christmas
Carol”
“Oh! But he was
a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching,
grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint,
from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and
self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old
features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait;
made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating
voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.
He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in
the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”
What an
incredible description of this character who is the antithesis of Christmas,
who of course becomes its ultimate hero.
“A Christmas Carol” was first
published in 1843, it tells the story of the transformation of the
mean-spirited Ebenezer Scrooge through the visits of his former business
partner Jacob Marley and three other ghosts on Christmas Eve. Earlier that day
Scrooge is visited by two benefactors who wish to make provisions for the poor.
Scrooge refuses and tells them that prisons and workhouses were the only institutions
that he his willing to support and the badly off must go there. When one of the
benefactors points out that many can’t go there and would rather die Scrooge goes
further with his Malthusian view that the poor, ill and infirm are surplus to the
needs of society and that “If they would rather die,
they’d better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Sounds shocking I know and yet haven’t
we all heard echoes of this in the last couple of years. I certainly have about
the weak and the vulnerable at the beginning of the pandemic and once again in
recent weeks with regard to refugees who have tried to cross the water to
safety too, many who have died trying. Are the lives of such people worth less
than those of others? It seems that the spirit of Scrooge is still with us.
Thankfully it is not the only spirit alive at this time and at all times.
“A Christmas Carol” was an attack
on the social injustices of the time, particularly the indifference of wealthy
towards the poor. The introduction of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act took away
local parish help for the poor and institutionalized the process with Union
workhouses. In return for food and shelter, the poor had to live
semi-incarcerated lives in institutions where families were often split apart and
made to do menial tasks to earn their keep. Scrooge views the poor and
economically inactive, which he calls idle, as a burden to society, better off
in a workhouse or even dead.
Scrooge is transformed by the
visions that the ghosts show him. He is shown visions of the present, where he
sees the impact of poverty on Crachit’s family, particularly his disabled son Tiny
Tim who he is warned will die unless his life alters. The ghost repeats Scrooge’s
callous remarks back to him “If he be likely to
die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” This
is more graphically shown by the two figures of an emaciated boy and
girl, known as “Ignorance” and “Want”. When Scrooge is touched
by their plight, the Ghost again uses his words against him, saying to
Scrooge “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
“Want and ignorance” are still with
others, as is this attitude that some lives are of less value than others. That
said the spirit that transformed Scrooge is also still with us. It is the
spirit that is at the heart of the original Christmas mythos of two thousand
years and is at the heart of the message exemplified in the life of Jesus. If a
heart as frozen as Mr Scrooge’s could be thawed then so can all others.
This to me is the message of the
whole Christmas story; this is the message of the universal Christmas “mythos”.
This is the religious message of Christmas and the message that the life of
Jesus brought to humanity. It is a message that applies as much today as it did
then.
Some say that we should not give
too much, you will have nothing left. Well such people have not yet learnt the
strange arithmetic of giving, which multiplies by subtraction. The more we give
from the heart, the more the love increases.
Perhaps this is the spirit that we
need to bring to life through our lives this Christmas season and beyond. We
are going to need to as we attempt to rebuild once we eventually come through
the other side of this pandemic.
The Christmas “Mythos” is that of
perfect love incarnating in human form. That love can manifest itself today in
our hearts and lives. We all have the capacity for great good, if we would but
feed the good wolf within each of us. It is surely here that the hope for the
whole of humanity lies. If we feed the loving wolf within us the wolf of hate
and fear dies off. If we do we have already begun to spread love and we begin
to bring joy to the world.
There is so much that is wrong with
our world. Watching the news each night highlights this. “Want and ignorance”
are still with us. There is so much that mocks those bells at Christmas time
and there does indeed seem to be a deficit of “peace on earth and good will to
all.” I do not believe that it has to be like that. We can incarnate that love
in our lives and we can begin to spread it out into our world. I do believe in
the chaos theory of compassion and hope that you do to.
This
brings to my heart the beautiful words of Mr
Scrooge toward the end of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol”
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”
Scrooge became the Christmas hero because he brought the reality of what Christmas is truly about to life; through him the spirit of Christmas came to life. It is the same for everyone, regardless of time and place.
We must do more than that though, we must respond
in love and do what we can in this our shared world, as Mr Scrooge did.
This to me is the heart of
Christmas, this giving of ourselves in love and service for others. Self-giving
love is a love that grows the more that we give it away. A love that is at the core
of each and every one of us if we would but nurture it in the mangers of our
own hearts and give birth to it in our living and breathing.
This is what Christmas means to me and why as the years have gone by I have come to believe in Christmas more and more. That said, like everyone, I still have my own “Bah Humbug” moments.
I believe in
Christmas, the soul of Christmas, the spirit of Christmas, the heart of
Christmas the religion of Christmas more today than I ever did at any moment in
my life. Today I believe everything about Christmas and a whole lot more than
everything that we think we know.
As the old song
goes “Oh I wish it could be Christmas every day.” Well it can be, but we must
give birth to it in our hearts and lives.
Below is a devotion based on the material in this "blog spot"
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