AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - XVIII

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

          One of the distinctive features of Scrooge’s encounter with Jacob Marley is that the latter is bound in and dragging a chain.

          He appears bound in chains.  He lifts the chain, then casts it down despairingly, “as if it was the cause of all his unavailing grief.”  He shakes it “so hideously” at that hour if he was in Switzerland the local noise cops would already be at his door.  He cannot escape it.

          No deity has bound him.  “I wear the chain I forged in life ….  I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”

          The chain is no external imposition; it was self-assumed bondage for which there is now no “safe word” to escape it.  The chain is the sins Marley freely committed: the evil done, the good not done.  No one forced him into it but himself: “my own free will.”

          Too bad, Jacob.

          “Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have labored on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!”

          Dickens notes that Scrooge looked around himself, expecting to see “fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing.”  The George C. Scott film clarifies that blindness: Marley tells Scrooge “mine were [also] invisible until the day of my death.”

          Hell is not God’s doing; it is man’s.  Many saints have said that God does not so much judge a man as ratifies a man’s choices: a man who chooses to damn himself cannot be saved against his will.  If he could, it would mean love can be coerced.  That is the “mystery of evil” (II Thes 2:7). 

          But man “doesn’t understand!”  Lucifer fully understood what his choice would entail, but choose damnation nonetheless.  Obviously, he would have chosen damnation without suffering, but that would have involved redesigning reality: a piece of reality where God does not exist.  No, choices also entail their consequences: a man has no grievance against gravity if he chooses to walk off the edge of the Grand Canyon.

          And it is very much bound up with the “ethic of choice” which so entices Americans.

          Freedom is an important thing.  The world is like it is because God respects freedom.  Respecting freedom means allowing people to choose evil (although, necessarily, with its consequences).  Freedom alone does not save us.

          But choosing evil does not make it good.  “Choice” is not some moral alchemy that turns base evil into golden good.  Choice is necessary, but it is a necessary means: it makes what I choose—good or evil—mine.  But it is a means.  The end of human action is the good.  The good is to be done; the good is to be done freely so that I acquire moral merit for it.

          And, as we see with chained Marley, choices can also be bad – and carry consequences.

          The temptation of “choice” is expressed in Marley’s chains.  We forge our chains by evil deeds, lulled by the illusion we do not see how our claims to “freedom” really make us ever more unfree, progressively chain us until, at our deaths, the full “weight and length and breadth” of that chosen ugliness can no longer be hidden.

          It’s not just Marley.  In another scene often left on the cutting room floor to make the “Christmas Carol” “move along,” when Marley leaves Scrooge he disappears out a window, where he merges into a cloud of other damned spirits. “Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free.”

          “Christmas Carol” focuses on a particular capital sin: avarice.  The thing about “capital sins” is that they are capita --  “heads” – motives which provide the spiritual fuel for many individual sins, not all of which are greed but are usually driven by greed.  Scrooge’s contempt for other people is a sin in itself, but its root cause is greed: he deems them valueless because they cost him.

          But there are other capital sins.  Take lust.  In the Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis presents lust as a giant salamander, weighing a man down with base temptations while occasionally lying about behaving.  It’s a chain nonetheless.

          In the Benedictus, Zechariah’s great canticle in which he praises God for giving him a son, John the Baptist, who will herald the Messiah’s coming.  The distinctive note of that Messiah is that God “has come to His people and set them free” (Lk 1:68).  The message of Christmas is that Christ wants to unchain us.  He has opened the jailhouse door.  But whether we walk out it remains our choice.