AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - II

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

          Dickens introduces the Carol’s main character, Ebenezer Scrooge. His description is not complimentary.

“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, shriveled 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.”

182 years after Dickens wrote, I wonder if a contemporary author would characterize a character as a “covetous old sinner.”  Dickens does … and it’s true.  One of the maladies of our time is a failure to recognize sin … and that we are all sinners.  The message of both Christianity and Christmas is not “I’m OK, you’re OK.”  In fact, the message of both is “we’re not OK.” 

Jesus comes into the world because we are sinners, because human beings need redemption.  Man needs redemption from his self-chosen evil.  Sin is not something that “befalls” him – it is something he chooses, wants, does.  St. Paul calls it the “mystery of evil” and a mystery indeed it is – why man chooses to cling to spiritual poison rather than spit it out.

Covetous old sinner Scrooge is also “secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.”  Sin is toxic to relationships: with God, with my neighbor, with myself.  The only true bond that can unite people is love and sin goes right for the jugular of charity, cutting it off. 

In his first encyclical, Pope St. John Paul II wrote these memorable lines: “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it” (Redemptor hominis no. 10). 

We see that in Dickens’s description of Scrooge.  “The cold within him” – his lack of love – “froze his old features” so that even his physiognomy reflects his inner distortion. 

When in Genesis 2:17 God tells Adam and Eve not to take the forbidden fruit – not to sin (because sin is what the forbidden fruit that tempts us, too) – He connects that act with death.  It’s not an arbitrary punishment God imposes.  It is the unavoidable consequence of sin: to cut one’s self off from God is to die.  One cannot separate one’s self from the Source of Being without falling into non-being, i.e., death.  As my first theology professor, Fr. Valery Jasinski, used to put it: if the lamp is unplugged from the socket, the power plant is not “punishing” it because the light dies.  That’s just the ineluctable result of breaking one’s connection to the source of one’s power.

Yes, Scrooge walks around, but in a real sense he’s a dead man walking. 

The question in Advent is: what about me?  How is my connection with God?  With my neighbor?  If we’re honest, we all have to admit: it could be better.  Maybe we need the power company to restore broken connections.  Maybe we just need tightening the wires a little better.  In any event, that’s what Advent is for – so that we’re not the caricature of life Scrooge is.