AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - XI

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

          As I observed in the first essay of this series, literary critics have recognized Dickens’s extraordinary talent in incorporating memento mori into a Christmas story.  For, ultimately, who other than the Grim Reaper is the Ghost of Christmas Future?  Dickens costumes him as such.  His lack of speaking confirms the saying, “silent as the grave.” 

          For a man’s fate at death is generally hidden from this world: but for those canonized, we cannot speak of the destinies of those who have gone before us.  That is the purpose of the General Judgment: because a man is part of this world and its history, justice demands that how he fit into that world – for good or bad – should also be known.  But, short of the particular judgment and the Last Day, we commend those questions to God.

          That’s one reason why the Ghost of Christmas Future is silent.  Another is respect for the human condition.  As Scrooge puts it in the Carol’s film version, “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends.  I accept that.  But if those courses be departed from, the ends must change.”  Life is not determined.  The future is not fixed.  But the future begins now. 

          Scrooge’s past has been challenged by purification of memory.  His present has been presented for his consideration.  If nothing changes, his foreshadowed future is dismal.

          That said, let me also add the Stave IV, the chapter about the Ghost of Christmas Future is both the most powerful and weakest chapters in the Carol. 

          It’s most powerful because it gives a powerful galvanizing motive to change his ways: death.  The fixedness of life and the finality of death has a way of galvanizing a person’s attention.  No small numbers of conversions have taken place on deathbeds.

          The risk of deathbed conversion, however, is its insincerity.  Just as people convince themselves that what they know is bad is really “good,” so they also have an amazing capacity to talk themselves out of believing the end is at hand.  Even if they manage to believe that, the debilitation of sickness and/or old age tends to divide attention and dilute will: focus on conversion competes with all sorts of other things, including sheer weakness.  And only God knows whether resolutions firmly made in the face of death will endure if that threat is removed.  People tend to be set in their ways, for good or evil: is it fair to presume radical change easily takes place amidst such circumstances?

          Still, death does have a way of fixing our gaze, and Dickens uses it to fix Scrooge’s.  He saw what he has been.  He sees what he is.  All that remains is to see what he likely will be.

          And the future is not pretty.  An abandoned corpse threatened by vermin.  A dead man pilfered of his possessions, down to the blanket on his deathbed.  The reactions of others ranging from feeling put upon to lay him to rest to being happy that a creditor is dead. A neglected grave.

          Those phenomena would have spoken to people in Victorian England.  How much they do to moderns is a different question.  Death for us is clinical and largely invisible.  Wakes are disappearing.  Funerals now are often planned at the convenience of funeral goers, not the demands of the body – which is often absent from the “memorial service.”  And how many people regularly visit a cemetery?

          Even if our society thinks it benefits in many ways from the “culture of death” the paradox is that culture prefers to be unseen. 

          So why do I think this part of the Carol may be weakest?  Because of the lack of an explicit supernatural meaning to death.

          Scrooge is going to die.  So are we all.  Death is inescapable.  Even if he reforms his life, Scrooge will still have a date with the undertaker.

          But Scrooge’s whole journey with the Ghost of Christmas Future doesn’t bring out explicit supernatural consequences for the kind of life Scrooge has led.  What Dickens details is natural – and not particularly unnatural for Scrooge. 

          Too few mourners?  Marley was buried with fewer and, to date, it didn’t seem to bother Ebenezer.  An abandoned corpse?  Self-respect might demand better protection but, ultimately, you’re dead.  Whether you are food for rats now or for worms later is a time question.  Some pilfered goods?  Scrooge’s mourners wonder who his heir will be (“his company, perhaps?”) but it doesn’t look like he’s necessarily making bequests to his nephew.  An abandoned grave?  He was happily alone in life; why not save on the “perpetual upkeep” fee?  Social opinion has not to date had much impact on him.

          All these misfortunes could befall a just man, too.  So, since death is inescapable and these misfortunes contingent, what is it that motivates Scrooge? 

          It’s here that Dickens’s attenuated sense of religion is most felt.  Bob Cratchit goes to his son’s grave out of grief and promises to bring the family out of some sense of communion.  Nobody grieves for Scrooge and his lack of communion has hitherto not disturbed him.  Both Scrooge and Tiny Tim are dead.  So what changes Scrooge?

          I’d like to think an implicit eschatology, an unspoken English Protestant belief that a just God does not subject the good and evil to the same fate.  There are hints of that in the Carol.  Marley’s damnation is suggested by certain movements: “its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapor from an oven.”  The lament of the damned Scrooge sees after Marley’s departure is marked by piercing regret.  A life after death is assumed, but its contours left mostly undefined.

          Is that enough to change a man?

          It was I believe the Polish Dominican Jacek Salij who once observed that there are two essential features about whether somebody really believes in God: they pray and they believe in “the life of the world to come.”  Because unless there is a post-mortem life, then all men end the same way: as effluent from roughly $5 worth of chemicals (unless you are selling off body parts to the nearest researcher).  If “that’s all there is,” then “eat, drink, and be merry; for tomorrow, we die.”

          Dickens clearly wants us to believe Scrooge reckoned with life after death.  The question for us is: do we?  Do we really believe I will continue after death? Note the “really.”  I’m not asking if we notionally believe that. We might affirm the theoretical proposition but live and act like we don’t.  So, if the Carol is to follow through in our lives, we come back to the question: do I really believe in “the life of the world to come?”  And, if I say I do, how is my life any different?