AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - XVII

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

          There’s a remark Marley makes during his visitation of Scrooge which is often overlooked, omitted in performances or television or film depictions.  When Marley laments his seven years of damned postmortem wandering, he adds this paragraph: “Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know, that ages of incessant labor by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!”

          Note the sentence I have emphasized.  By “usefulness” what Marley really means is “the good it could have done.”  Dickens is writing in the heyday of utilitarianism, after Jeremy Bentham and a contemporary of John Stuart Mills (though Mills had yet to write his major work on the subject), so the focus on “usefulness.”  He’s reflecting the intellectual conceits of his time; he is not necessarily endorsing them.

          In making man in His image and likeness, God entrusted a certain degree of creatorship to the human person.  God did not give him a completed world.  He gave him something of an IKEA-world: some assembly required.  God did not give man houses.  He gave him brains and trees.  So, as Catholic theology emphasizes, work is not a “punishment” for man.  It is part of his very creative responsibility.

          And his creation includes the creation of good.  Love, after all, is wanting the good for another.  And while we need God’s grace to do the good (because we are sinners), the free doing of moral good (under God’s grace) means sharing the best thing we can give another person: our love.  Things can have “good” consequences for us: an afternoon shower to break the heat on a hot summer’s day, for example.  But clouds don’t acquire moral merit for raining.  The good we do – the free gift of our will to do the good God inspires and aids us to do – is truly a share of our moral selves – our love –with others.

          When Marley sings of the “vast means” of good a single soul can produce, he reminds us of the amazing perspectives God opens up in our lives.  The limited number of years we have can hardly contain all the good we could do.  That perspective, in turn, should make us take time seriously.  Wasted time is wasted good.  Wasted time is time lost to making this world more permeated with God’s goodness. 

          Note, too, that this calling to do good is a great but humble one.  The diligent soul striving to do good “in its little sphere, whatever it may be,” will find his life too short for all the good he can or wants to do.  His “little sphere” suggests a quiet corner, anywhere in life.  Obviously, those given to prominent spots in the world have both the greater potential and greater responsibility for greater good: noblesse oblige.  But no good work is unimportant. 

          When he discussed his vocation to the priesthood, Karol Wojtyla (the future St. John Paul II) emphasized the role his father played in teaching him to pray and to be responsible.  Here was a man being a father, in a little Polish village, raising a boy as a father alone after becoming a widower and losing his three other children.  He may have thought of himself “just” as a father raising a boy alone, but the good he did was making a priest, a Pope for millions of people, a saint.  Our “spheres” may be humble and invisible, but none are “little,” much less unimportant.  If we did not fight Him, we are where God wanted us to be.

          As you reflect on your preparation for Christmas, do you think about how every day, in ways big and small, you can make the world you live in – the world – good?  Because you do not want to lament – as Marley does – for good wasted.