A Christmas Carol

December 12, 2004

Rev. Larry Smith

“Marley was dead: to begin with.”¹ Those are the first words in Charles Dickens’ story A Christmas Carol.  Charles Dickens liked dramatic and unusual opening lines to all of his stories.  Who, after all, can forget the opening words to A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times?”  The beginning to A Christmas Carol though, introduces us to a ghost story.  We need to know that Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge’s business partner is long dead and buried.   The stage is set for night-time visits by spirits that walk the earth.

A Christmas Carol is probably the second most popular Christmas story in the English language, being trumped possibly only by the story given in the Christian Gospel.  And who does not know the story of A Christmas Carol?  If the story  is unfamiliar to you then I have to wonder how far your home world is from our solar system.  The actors who have portrayed Scrooge on television, stage and screen are legion.  I’ve even seen a Bugs Bunny version of A Christmas Carol.  Hollywood and Broadway milk this story every year.

In a real way though, a discrete subtext underlies this story about ghostly visitations and Ebenezer Scrooge.  Dickens wrote the story about Ebenezer Scrooge at a very important turning point in his life.  A few years earlier his wife’s sister had died and Dickens’ subsequent grief caused him to venture on a religious journey.  In 1842 he traveled to the United States.  Dickens hoped to find progressive religious bodies freed from state control.  Then, as now, that is hardly the case.  He discovered that the churches in this country at that time were hardly any more broad-minded than the ones in Europe.  He noted though that one denomination was markedly different – the Unitarians.  In the United States he met with Unitarian ministers and decided to attend a Unitarian church when he returned back to England. 

In 1843 Charles Dickens started attending the Little Portland Street Chapel, a Unitarian congregation in London.  He began writing letters about his new-found faith to his friends in the United States and in Britain.  He wrote that his friend the English Unitarian minister, Edward Taggert, had “that religion which has sympathy for men of every creed and ventures to pass judgment on none.”  Writing to an American friend Dickens said, “I have carried into effect an old idea of mine and joined the Unitarians, who would do something for human improvement if they could; and practice charity and toleration.”

Therein lies the heart, the spirit of Dickens’ story, A Christmas Carol.  Dickens wrote his story about Scrooge when he was at the height of his enthusiasm and activity in the Unitarian church on Little Portland Street.  Therefore, I believe that this story is a revelation of nineteenth century Unitarianism. 

A Christmas Carol is a story about Christmas but little mention is made of the story in the Bible.  Were you to thumb through A Christmas Carol you would find no specific mention of the birth of Jesus or any theological interpretations.  Two passages do allude to events from scripture but they are not packed with theological importance.  Tiny Tim likes to go to church and mentions that he hopes that his lame body will remind others of “him who made lame beggars walk and the blind to see.” ² Yes, Tiny Tim does bespeak of miracles but the importance to us, the readers, is that though we cannot perform miracles or feats of similar wonder, we do have the capacity to care for the sick and the poor.  We do have the capacity for compassion.

That is the underlying assumption in A Christmas Carol.  The nineteenth century Unitarians did not believe in any specific religious doctrine but they did believe that religion was more about living than believing.  The nineteenth century Unitarians were well-known in their time for their catch-phrase, “Deeds not creeds.”  They found that many people believed in religious ideas but had little interest in how one’s beliefs influenced their lives or the lives they lived with others.  In other words, one can subscribe to all the traditional creeds in Christendom and still be a thoroughly rotten person--or a true saint.

The nineteenth century Unitarians believed that Christianity was more important as a religion about living a generous and charitable life than it was a religion about particular religious doctrines.  They subscribed to Christian ethics in the belief that the ministry of Jesus was to care for others.  Their religion was about ethics.

Elaine Pagels is a Harvard University professor specializing in the early Christian scriptures.  Her books like The Gnostic Gospels and Adam, Eve and the Serpent have made the best-seller lists over the past ten years.  Elaine Pagels has had a similar revelation after pouring over early Christian texts for decades.  She believes that early Christianity was less a religion about belief than it was about a new way of being. 

It is just such a new way of being that we witness in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  Like most of Dickens’ stories A Christmas Carol is about society and ethics.  It’s about the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. 

The story begins with Ebenezer Scrooge encountering his nephew who arrives at his firm on Christmas Eve to wish him a merry Christmas.  Scrooge dismisses Christmas with a “Bah, humbug!”  Scrooge’s nephew defends Christmas thus:

There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say . . . 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 year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think the people below them as if they were really 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!³

After his nephew leaves two men arrive collecting money for the poor.  Scrooge dismisses them as well, saying that he does not need to give to the poor because there are enough prisons and workhouses to take care of their needs.  He dismisses them summarily.

Later that evening Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his business partner, Jacob Marley.  Marley’s ghostly form is covered by chains that he drags along.  Attached to Marley’s chains are “cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds and heavy purses wrought in steel,”⁴ representing the things Marley placed value to when he lived and are now burdens upon his spirit. 

We learn through their conversation that Marley and Scrooge were cast from the same mold.  And what is that mold?  They both valued only money, security.  They never shared their wealth with anyone, nor did it really ever bring any joy to each of them.  They led lives of miserable disconnection from their fellow humans.

Marley explains to Scrooge that he has arranged for three ghosts to visit him on Christmas Eve.  Marley explains to Scrooge that this will happen so Scrooge will not make the mistakes that Marley did when he lived.

The first ghost, the spirit of Christmas past, takes Scrooge to Christmas seasons of his youth and young adulthood.  Scrooge is presented as a poor young man with a sickly but happy sister.  He sees himself as a young apprentice at a great Christmas party hosted by his employer.  In Christmas past, Scrooge was happy. 

Then with the spirit of Christmas present, Scrooge visits the homes of many across the world and discovers the connections that the season brings.  He visits the home of his nephew and finds his nephew defending his mean, old uncle against the complaints of the rest of the family.  He visits the home of his employee, Bob Cratchitt and learns of the spirit of Tiny Tim.  Instead of being bitter and withdrawn about his disability, Tiny Tim sees in it the possibility of connection with others.  So filled with love is he that he proclaims, “God bless us, everyone!” 

With the third spirit, the spirit of Christmas future, Scrooge learns that he and Tiny Tim are fated to die soon.  He travels to a crime den and discovers that in his death the only people who have much to say about him are the women who steel his property when they discover his dead body. 

At the end of the book Scrooge awakes on Christmas day and reclaims his life.  He sends a turkey to Bob Cratchitt’s house, gives money for the poor and attends his nephew’s Christmas supper.  He is a changed man.  What has happened?

The nineteenth century Unitarians believed that human beings were innately good.  Scrooge, through life in the counting house, has become more and more divorced from his connections with humanity.  He can see human beings only in economic terms and has forgotten the love and care and connections which were also part of his own past.  He has closed himself off from the joy and the suffering of humanity.  He possesses wealth but takes no real benefit from it because his love of it and unwillingness to part with it separates him from all the emotions involved with human beings.

By appealing to his memories, the noble feelings that his fellow men had for him–even in his stinginess, and ultimately with his inevitable mortality, Scrooge is forced to recognize that he does care about others as much as he has been cared for by them in the past.  He is forced to recognize that his love of money blinds him to the suffering of others.

In a sense, we are all at risk of becoming Ebenezer Scrooge.  With a mobile and technological culture, with a nation covered by suburbs without sidewalks or front porches, with a national philosophy that emphasizes rugged individualism more than community, we are at risk of becoming like Scrooge.  We are always at risk that our personal concerns, our narcissistic tendencies, will take over and we will lose the ability even to communicate meaningfully with each other or even understand how others live. 

The nineteenth century Unitarians believed that human nature was innately good.  They also believed that the technological innovations of their era, the new industrial society, were breaking apart the connections that had existed in British society for centuries.  One of their guiding concerns was for education about the ills of society.  They felt that if everyone knew about the poverty in industrial revolution Britain, that the good in human nature would be appealed to and that society might change. Unitarians believed that if mill owners knew about conditions for mill workers, and as Scrooge’s nephew put it about Christmastide, “. . . to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think the people below them as if they were really fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys,”⁵ that they would care about the Tiny Tims of the world.

Today the Cratchitts of the world are still with us.  We may think that our fellow humans are distinct creatures, so different from ourselves that we have nothing in common.  Yet, whether it is acknowledged or not, every child born has a father and mother.  Every person knows joys and sorrows.  Were we to walk invisibly like Scrooge through the homes of other people the world round we would discover the fullness of the human condition – singing and dancing like Scrooge’s nephew to the beats of African drums, Asian flutes and Andean pipes-- sorrows at the loss of children and close friends and lovers.  We would find in equal measure in the homes of the rich and the poor a share of fools and sages, kindness and coldness, intelligence and stupidity, happiness and misery.  Were we but able to walk with a spirit guide through such places we would know that though we are not all alike, we are still all human.  In the words of Chief Seattle, “what befalls one, befalls all.”

In Dickens’ native Britain, this message was late in coming.  During the Second World War middle-class and upper-class Britons were exposed to the harsh realities of working class life when children were evacuated from the tenements and slums of their great industrial cities.  The people who learned about the lives working class children really lived were shocked and their compassion was so stirred that they moved their government in the post war years to create programs that would make better the lives of the most desperate class of Britons.  Contact with others stirred British compassion.

It is sad that this season is a time only for a moment in the headlong rush of our lives.  We hope not to become as separated as Scrooge from human contact.  We long to find the redemptive spirit of generosity as Scrooge later did.  We hope that we will have the spirit of connection to care for each other and the planet we live upon in all our days, that the natural connections between people will not be packed away with the twinkling Christmas tree light–only to be unpacked next year. 

The African-American theologian Howard Thurman characterized our needs as the “work of Christmas”:

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and the princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among brothers,

To make music in the heart.⁶

 Could we hope for anything more?  Everyday we are at risk of becoming the worst of Scrooge and the best as well.  Whether we live the spirit of Christmas in the seasons to come is up to our generosity and connections with life on this planet.  Dickens tells us that Scrooge was a changed man from his Christmas encounter and that he made Christmas a central nexus of his life thereafter.

The truth is that we are all like Scrooge.  We are all mortal and when we think of death it is common to think of the things we have contributed to humanity.  Some people are gifted with the ability to lead others to the good.  Others have generosity of spirit that lives on  and sustains their families and friends.  All cannot give of their lives great things like curing diseases or writing great poetry to last the ages. But whatever good we can do here and now, it is our blessing and our opportunity to do it.  Unitarian Universalism believes that human beings through recognizing our interconnections can build a better world and that it is our duty to try to do just that. As Dickens said of Unitarians about one hundred sixty years ago, we can still be people “who would do something for human improvement if they could; and practice charity and toleration.”

Please indulge me today as I end this discourse on A Christmas Carol and Unitarianism by sharing with you the ending of the story.

Scrooge was better than his word.  He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he became a second father.  He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.  Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms.  His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

He had no intercourse with Spirits . . . and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if man alive possessed the knowledge.  May that be truly said of us, and all of us!  And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!⁷

May we keep Christmas in our hearts when this season is passed.  May we work for human improvement to the best of our ability.  May we continue to practice charity and toleration.  May we make music in the hearts of the world.  In faith, in hope, in love.  Amen.

Copyright Larry Smith