AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - XIV

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

          When Scrooge declares that his experience of “feeling,” especially “depth of feeling” at Tiny Tim’s death, has taught him all he needs to know, he thinks his journey of reformation is over.  The Ghost of Christmas Future thinks otherwise.

          When Scrooge asks to be taken “home,” the Ghost obliges – except not to where Scrooge expected home to be.  The final scene with the Ghost takes place in a cemetery.

          It’s interesting Dickens calls the place a “churchyard.”  It might be, for all we know, as close as Scrooge ever got to a church.  The preferred Catholic term is “cemetery” which, etymologically, is a “place of sleep.”  The very term Catholics use points to the idea of life after death.

          The story has to end in that churchyard, for three reasons.  First, man’s days are numbered: there’s a cemetery in everybody’s future.  Did Scrooge really think his future was limited to a comfortable retirement in his house?   Second, the Judaeo-Christian perspective is that death is the fruit of sin.  Dickens calls Scrooge a “sinner” practically on the first page of the Carol, whose entire story has been about the possible redemption of Scrooge’s life from its sinful ways.  You can’t talk about sin without death, nor redemption without resurrection (which presupposes first dying).  Third, absent that final confrontation with death – face-to-face – Scrooge’s conversion is incomplete.

          Scrooge has evaded facing the truth that he is the abandoned man on the bed.  He has pretended conversations about him were about others that might be pertinent to him.  He has tried to believe his stolen goods really weren’t his.  He refused to admit that the emotions of greed and relief associated with death just might apply to him.  And, when confronted with the body in the bedroom, Scrooge shrinks back from literally uncovering the truth.

          As long as that does not happen, there is always the illusion somehow this all doesn’t apply to him.

          That is why the Ghost leads him to his grave.  If Scrooge can’t look himself in his death face, he can at least look at his tombstone.  And only when he does that can there be no doubt whom everything he saw was all about.  And only then – in the absence of that doubt – will his conversion stand on firm ground.

          That confrontation forces Scrooge decisively to metanoia – to “change his mind” – about things.  “I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!” 

          And because confession of sin must be accompanied by firm purpose of amendment, Scrooge joins his renunciation of the old man with resolution about the new: “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

          The scene concludes with a prayer – a penance? – “Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed” the scene ends.  The first phase of Scrooge’s conversion is complete.  The second is just beginning.

          The same is true of all of us.  We are all called decisively to reject mortal sin, those things that separate us from God.  But we are always called to grow deeper and deeper in our love of God, a process for which there is no stopping point because in all love – human and especially divine – there is no point where we have “loved enough.”

          Scrooge’s conversion is sealed when he confronts who he has become, what that entails, and renounces it.  Our conversions must be similar. 

          Advent is an appropriate time for that conversion to be sealed sacramentally, in the Sacrament of Penance/Reconciliation.  Most parishes schedule additional times for confessions during the Advent season, especially in these last days before Christmas.  Are we ready, like Scrooge, to take that step towards sealing our conversion sacramentally?