A Christmas Carol: Important Messages for a Modern Audience

Rereading Charles Dickens’s Christmas classic A Christmas Carol this year, I was struck by several passages that seemed to apply to modernity just as much as they applied to 19th century England. At risk of becoming preachy, I would like to share a few of these relevant passages and reflect on what lessons we can learn still today from the conversion story of the miserly Scrooge.

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.

We undeniably live in a culture that does not, by and large, include community, especially since Covid. I am as guilty of this as anyone. When I ride down the elevator with someone I don’t really know, I sometimes am glad to see the person attentively reading his phone, so I don’t have to exchange greetings. People sit next to each other for hours on airplanes and never so much as say, “Hello.” Friends sit across from each other at a restaurant and check their social media feeds at length. Young people sit in corners at family gatherings and play video games on their phones. Neighbors don’t know each other’s names. Teenagers mention their boyfriends or girlfriends and then admit they have never seen their significant other in person. No one writes letters or thank you notes and many of the last few families who had holiday gatherings with extended family seem to have given up the practice post-Covid. I knew young people even from supposedly conservative Catholic families who were not allowed to visit their parents for the holidays last year until they quarantined. How many of us are truly Scrooge, edging our way along the paths of life, trying not to feel any sympathy for those we encounter, keeping our distance even from those who should be closest?

This Christmas season, if you are one of those people (like me) who struggles with community, do something to go out of your way for a friend or family member. Write a Christmas letter to a relative. Go visit the friend you haven’t seen in months. Deliver food to the food bank in person. Fezziwig, in contrast to Scrooge, is described as having made his employees and neighbors very happy with his kindness, and yet the Ghost of Christmas Past says that Fezziwig did so with a comparatively trifling sum of money and a few hours of dancing and games in his place of business. Sometimes it really is the little things that make someone’s day or holiday.

I also have to say about this passage that I could not help thinking of those individuals who still go to the grocery store or the airport but seem so utterly terrified of Covid that, if you are anywhere in their vicinity maskless, they will edge past you with faces averted, looking like hunted animals. I’ve also had a few scream at me that I’m killing them or something along those lines. Those people are literally terrified of human contact. That is a terribly unhealthy and tragic way to live one’s life.

“Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.

“What else can I be,” returned the uncle [Scrooge], “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”. . .

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

The most key part of this passage, I think, is the part I put in bold. The interesting thing is that Scrooge is not strictly wrong. For many of us, we find at Christmas that we have spent more money than we could afford (including on presents), that we have not become richer than we were last year, and that we have not been so wise with our resources as we ought to have been. What Scrooge misses, of course, is that Christmas is precisely about the spiritual blessings of life and not the material blessings. Christ’s Mass celebrates the birth of the God-man Jesus, who was born in a stable, laid in a manger, and adored first by poor shepherds. I don’t imagine that Mary and Joseph, shivering in a stable, found the first Christmas materially a comfortable and luxurious one; but that didn’t matter, because they had Christ. It is typical for even sincere Christians nowadays to measure everything by material gain. Yet many of the people and things that have most blessed us spiritually in life have not been great sources of monetary enrichment. Perhaps modernity has lost all sense of non-monetary gain, and that is partly why we are so ungrateful and unhappy.

“Under the impression that [state institutions] scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

That phrase—“It’s not my business!” Countless people still use it today as an excuse for not interfering for the good. G.K. Chesterton once observed that only irrational optimists change the world, because only they are shocked by injustice. Put another way, most people say “It’s not my business” and accept injustice with a sigh of regret or a shrug of indifference.

Furthermore, there is Scrooge’s observation, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” Now that I have certainly heard in countless variations in my life. Sometimes it takes a more explicit form, as when politicians or activists advocate zealously for the supposed right to kill their own children (abortion) or family members (euthanasia). These people really do want “inconvenient” or supposedly “useless” members of society to die. These people do not see the precious uniqueness of every human soul, they only see other humans as obstacles to their happiness and convenience. Sometimes this mentality takes a more softened or seemingly benign form, as those who advocate for contraception or as few children as possible. Sometimes these people really think that they are pro-life, and I would not like to assume that they are not sincere. But one can be sincere and well-intentioned and still wrong, as C.S. Lewis pointed out in The Great Divorce.

You are not more or less virtuous for having one child rather than eight, or for not having children at all, depending on circumstances. A family does not become more a family simply because it has more members. On the other hand, having more children should be seen not as a burden, or a competition, but as a blessing. Heaven knows my siblings and I had enough quarrels and squabbles growing up, but I always stared dumbfounded at anyone who suggested I might have wanted to be an only child. The blessings a large family brings—whether that means that you have five siblings or many close friends—always outweigh the negatives. Anything that separates life from love (which contraception does as much as abortion) can only result in moral and cultural crises. (As for those who talk about overpopulation, I think they can never have driven across America, and seen the vast amount of land just in this country that is unoccupied. As for resources, we are continually finding ways of increasing our productions at rates never before deemed possible.)

“Why do you doubt your senses?” [Marley’s Ghost asked.]

“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”. . .

“Man of the worldly mind!” replied the Ghost.

This is an interesting interchange because, on one level, Scrooge is right. One’s senses can become clouded based on various bodily factors. On the other hand, Scrooge, who has clearly not noticed indigestion previous to this moment, is rather grasping at any “reasonable” or material explanation with a degree of probability and imposing it on the situation rather than realizing that the problem he has been struggling with has resulted in this situation. In other words, Scrooge is incapable of admitting that there is a spiritual realm, and though his arguments against it may indeed seem to have a good deal of rational probability, in the long run they have nothing to do with reality.

This passage may not seem terribly important, but reading it I could not help thinking of how many Christians and Catholics I know have at various times scoffed at the very suggestion that such and such a priest received a vision, or such and such a friend was told to pursue this course by God, or God could interfere in such and such a way to stop that ordinary obstacle from interfering. Now, just as with Scrooge, the naysayers do in fact have a reasonable point here—that it is easy to mistake intense emotional experiences for a sign from God, unless one is a great saint or has a learned spiritual director. Even St. John of the Cross warned people new to the spiritual life to be careful about assuming that every seeming spiritual experience was a direct message from God.

On the other hand, the spiritual world touches the material a good deal more often than most people seem to realize. God, through Our Lady, made the sun dance on behalf of three poor little shepherd children just last century; in the Korean War a US Marine was saved by a fellow “soldier” with only the name Michael who slew their attackers with a sword (St. Michael); and God will do something so small as stop the rain for you so you can get the wooden furniture inside. Caution should never become disbelief, and we should never miss the messages from Heaven because we are so caught up in the material explanations.

Whether you agree with me or not on all these points, I highly recommend reading A Christmas Carol this year! Dickens is far more eloquent than I am, and therefore bound to get across the true meaning of Christmas in the most inspiring and touching way possible.

And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!