AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - XVI

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

          After recounting Scrooge’s changed ways on his Christmas and Boxing Days, Dickens wraps up the “Carol” with a single paragraph summarizing the permanence of Ebenezer’s mended ways.  “Scrooge was better than his word.  He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was 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 other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

          Moral conversion is strange.  God takes my intentions at the time when I repent, content to take my promise of an altered life when we suspect and He already knows our potential succumbing to future temptation.  When we receive absolution, God counts our intentions – sincere intentions – not our results (which He already knows).
            But perseverance in good is both a sign of the genuineness of our conversion as well as what we ought to resolve to pursue. Scrooge proved the authenticity of his conversion by his life. 

          But it’s not just deeds that Dickens mentions.  Look at that paragraph.  Conversion is a two-sided coin: it involves turning from sin and to the good. Ultimately, it involves our relationship with Persons: ourselves or God.  St. Augustine said there were two kinds of love in the world: amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui or amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei – the love of God to the contempt of self or the love of self to the contempt of God. 

          In many ways, our fellow human beings are sacramental stand-ins for God: as St. John makes clear, we cannot say we love the God we cannot see if we do not love the brother – made in the image and likeness of God – whom we do see (I Jn 4:20).  Dickens points out Scrooge’s social blossoming.  From someone who, at the beginning of the “Carol,” is named as somebody even blind men’s guide dogs would lead their masters away from, Scrooge is now “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew.”  The misanthrope has become social. 

          But there’s a special reference here: his relationship to Tiny Tim. Scrooge’s Boxing Day conversation with Cratchit suggests he will become the lad’s benefactor.    But Scrooge is not described as the boy’s “friend” but as a father, a “second father.” 

          Fatherhood is a unique relationship, albeit one the modern world depreciates because of its marginalization of paternity.  Two points witness to the importance Christianity attaches to it.  When the Apostles ask Jesus to teach them to pray, he says “when you pray, say ‘Our Father…” (Lk 11:2).  When St. Paul discusses it, he writes that all fathers in heaven and on earth derive their name from the one Father in heaven (Eph 3:15).  It is not that human fatherhood is projected on to God; it is that human fatherhood is but a reflection of the primordial Fatherhood of God, in another way the “image of God” in our human fathers.  So, to speak of fatherhood is to speak of a unique, special, and privileged relationship: one cannot be closer to anyone than him from whom one is begotten.  So, to privilege Scrooge with the title “second father” is no mere tribute to the financial benefactions he wrought in Tiny Tim’s life. 

          Sin drives a man into himself.  Grace connects him: to all the parts of himself; to his world; to his fellow man; and to his God.  When Jesus commands us to love God and love neighbor, it’s not just an order or even a nice thought; it is the prerequisite for any real love.  John Donne wrote “no man is an island,” but that is only partially true.  He should not be an island, but he can make himself into one, albeit at the cost of warping his humanity.