AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - VI

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

          It’s Christmas Eve.  Scrooge has made his way home to his empty house and a soothing cup of gruel before going to sleep.

          On his way, he may have remembered it was the anniversary of his partner’s death, Jacob Marley.  Was it the power of suggestion that made him think his door knocker looked like old Jacob?

          Scrooge is uneasy, though he doesn’t know why.  One thing lots of security experts will tell you is: trust your gut.  You may often have a visceral sense of something being awry long before a conscious awareness of it.

          Scrooge doesn’t trust his gut.  He prefers to blame its wariness on an “undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.”

          That’s when the unexpected starts to unfold.

          Scrooge hears noises, clanking, bells ringing, the knob of his securely closed bedroom door turning.  Suddenly, standing before him is something – someone – unfamiliar yet familiar.  Jacob Marley.  Jacob Marley the Ghost.

          The specter acknowledges “you don’t believe in me,” which Scrooge confirms.  Thereupon, a philosophical discussion ensues. Good crypto-Thomist, the ghost asks “what evidence would you have of my reality beyond your senses?”  Sensory perception is, after all, the ordinary way people know.

          But ever since Descartes, we’ve depreciated sensory knowledge. Instead of letting a real world out there shape our ideas, we have decided that our ideas – our cogito, ergo sum – should constitute the world out there.  Is there actually a world out there, or is it all just a projection of what’s in our heads?  Do we build the world from our heads?

          This is not the stuff of a college philosophy 101 bull session.  It’s the foundation, for example, of gender ideology.

          Scrooge admits that, apart from his senses, “I don’t know” how else I would know.  But I don’t admit what I’m sensing.  So, in the best intellectual fashion, Scrooge dismisses Marley’s Ghost as “more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

          At that point, Marley’s Ghost decides to elevate the intellectual discourse by shaking his chains, wailing out loud, and unbandaging his head, allowing his slack, corpse-like jaw to fall.  In other words, to scare the living daylights out of Scrooge.

          Having properly gained his subject’s attention, Marley gets down to business.

          He explains his fate: he is chained and punished (the “specter being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own”).  Without saying it, he is in hell.  But, as Catholic theology would have it, hell is first of all a state, not a place: the damned carry hell with them.  Marley’s hell is to witness others being as indifferent to the poor as he was and to be able to do nothing about it.  He admits sitting invisibly besides Scrooge, watching him sin by avarice: just as there is a communion of saints, there is an anti-communion of the damned.  And it’s not just Marley’s private hell.  When he leaves, Scrooge has a vision of the circle of the damned, including the ghost of another colleague, dragging around his safe, bewailing his incapacity to help an indigent woman and her child freeing on a stoop.  “The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.”

          Scrooge feels sorry for fettered Marley but, hey, what can he do about it?  Why bother me?

          Marley invites Scrooge to conversion.  He doesn’t sugarcoat it with a kind of universalism, a benign approval of the caricature of  St. Augustine’s prayer (“convert me, Lord – tomorrow!”).  He speaks of it in Advent terms: “now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation.”

          Conversion entails urgency, and it’s urgency that normally diverts a person from conversion.  Scrooge thanks Marley, hopeful he’ll get out.  He goes on, discussing the how of the opportunity for conversion: the haunting by three spirits.

          “I’d rather not.”  As would most of us.

          Marley is uncompromising: without this supernatural intervention, nothing will come of the conversion except nice thoughts, velleities never translated into action.  They will come; what you do with them will be your choice.

          Now, I’m not trying to talk readers into believing in ghosts.  But Marley’s sidebar on his existence is relevant to us.  Our modern minds also deny our senses: once upon a  time, knowing if somebody was a man or woman didn’t involve a DNA test.  It involved looking.  And when we – corporeal-spiritual beings that we are – deny our senses, we then often spin far more fantastic yarns about how we come to “know.” 

          Our world denies the “reality” of things we can’t quantify, measure, put in a test tube.  But is charity quantifiable?  When I was a graduate student, a Chicago professor delivered a guest lecture arguing just that: people were more charitable!  All you had to do was look at charitable deductions!  It took a grizzled old Jesuit to cut the malarkey down with one sentence: “maybe too many people have too much income to tax shelter?”
         
          Is love measurable?  Can you put it in a test tube and verify its presence, like cocaine in the presence of cobalt thiocyanate?  Or will we admit the wisdom of another British writer, two centuries before Dickens, that “there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy?”  Or that he may have riffed that idea from I Corinthians 2:9?

          If we believe there are more things than the eye of man has or can see, “things visible and invisible,” then should we also not ask whether this Advent is the “acceptable time” for our conversions?