AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - XV
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Think of Christmas and Charles Dickens, and most people immediately answer, “A Christmas Carol.” The tale of Ebenezer Scrooge has become so inseparable from the season that it is easy to forget Dickens was not merely telling a festive story, but offering a Christian meditation on time, memory, repentance, and grace.
Dickens’s 1843 short story launched his career of “Christmas books.” He wrote them annually throughout the 1840s, though few are remembered as well as the “Carol.” Probably the most well-known is his “Cricket on the Hearth.” But Dickens was a Christian and his commitment to Christmas was not just commercial. Among his many pieces on the holiday, let’s recall an 1851 essay, “What Christmas Is As We Grow Older.”
Most of us have fond memories of our childhood Christmases. Part of the reason is, according to Dickens, that back then Christmas comprehensively filled our whole world. “Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and everyone around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.”
Our worlds were made up of Christmas. We prepared for it. We celebrated it. We went to church. We prayed. We decorated. We sang. We sang in choirs. We dreamed of presents, made our lists and checked them more than twice. We caroled. We visited Santa Claus. For a wonderful interlude, everything centered on December 25.
Unfortunately, as Dickens and our lives both observe, “our thoughts over-leaped that narrow boundary.” People today might attribute it to the intrusion of quotidian life into our holiday. “Christmas” has to get squeezed into everything else we do. Instead of being that which globally defines everything, it shrinks into another thing that has to be fit into the whole. From magic it devolves into chore.
Dickens, however, is not so materialistic. For him, the diminishment of Christmas comes from the loss of someone – “perhaps, all so soon” – in our lives. Someone whose real presence in our Christmases past became the real absence in our Christmas present.
It’s been said a sign of Dickens’s mastery of storytelling was his ability successfully to insert the Grim Reaper (for whom else is the Ghost of Christmas Future) into a Christmas story? Dickens, I suspect, might dissent. He’d simply call it part of reality. (And he wasn’t even a Slav!)
In “What Christmas Is” Dickens is emphatic: include even those who have passed as part of our Christmas! “Of all days in the year, we will turn our faces towards that City upon Christmas Day, and from its silent hosts bring those we loved, among us. City of the Dead, in the blessed name wherein we are gathered together at this time, and in the Presence that is here among us according to the promise, we will receive, and not dismiss, thy people who are dear to us!”
It sounds a lot like “the communion of saints” to me. Because the Catholic message would be that, joined in grace and reconciled in God, we are still all joined together at Christmas. It’s why, in Polish Catholic custom, the Christmas Eve Wigilia meal always includes an empty place: because we believe it isn’t really empty. Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner captured this idea in his modern carol, “Koleda dla nieobecnych” [A Carol for Those Not Present]:
Give us faith that it makes sense,
That we need not mourn our friends.
That wherever they are, they are well
For they are we us, though in another form.
And convince us that’s how it should be,
In the voices from which the air still quivers
That they have passed on in order to live
And, this time, they will live forever.
Dickens also sounds very modern, but perhaps because what we think are our novel problems aren’t really that new. “No contact Christmas is the latest rage: cutting off somebody, especially family members, for some reason, perhaps politics. Dickens’s advice is not that of some moderns but it is very Christian. Is there somebody hidden from your Christmas, someone we see “[i]n yonder shadow, … obtruding furtively upon the blaze?” His upfront counsel: “By Christmas Day, we do forgive him!” If the injury he has done us may admit of such companionship, let him come here and take his place.” But, knowing the obstinacies of the human heart on both sides of that divide, at least, “[i]f otherwise, unhappily, let him go hence, assured that we will never injure nor accuse him” (emphasis added).
Our perspectives change as we grow older, but perhaps the key is recapturing the all-encompassing joy of childhood Christmases lies in incorporating everything into Christmas. Dickens sounds almost like Pope Francis:
“On this day we shut out Nothing!
“Pause,” says a low voice. “Nothing? Think!” “
On Christmas Day, we will shut out from our fireside, Nothing.”
Perhaps therein is how we will learn to keep Christmas well. God bless us everyone!
John Grondelski (PhD Fordham) was former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He is a Catholic theologian with special interests in moral theology and the thought of St. John Paul II. All views are his own.
