At this time of year, one is often inclined to be festive. Certainly, Christmas is a time of celebration. However, it is not yet Christmas, and Advent should be time for reflection and contemplation. One should take the opportunity of the season to look inwards – to consider one’s faults and failings, and how one might make oneself a better person, even if just in a small way, for the coming year. This is not an original thought; the Catholic Church encourages her adherents to spend Advent in contemplation of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. However, in popular culture, the same idea was proposed most famously in the timeless Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol.
The story of Ebenezer Scrooge has become one of the most re-told in the English language, with countless adaptations of varying quality, and many more stories attempting to re-imagine it or derive inspiration from it (“It’s a Wonderful Life” being a noteworthy example of this). Sadly, however, much of its original meaning is lost in this process of mass imitation, and thus it can be easy to overlook the crucial lessons it teaches. While it is – as most people know it – an uplifting story about an old miser changing his ways, it is also (and equally importantly) a brooding reflection on the idea of wasted life, and a warning against the terrible consequences of misusing one’s short time on earth.
The turning point of the story is the visit upon Scrooge paid by his seven-year-deceased business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley, despite receiving a mere handful of pages in the book, is one of the most tragic and terrifying characters ever written. In life, he was much like his partner Scrooge: a shrewd businessman with a stone-cold heart and a voracious appetite for money. When his life on earth finally came to an end, however, Marley was faced with the awful punishment for his wrongs; he was shackled to the chain of sins that he in life had fashioned for himself – a chain made of “cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel” – and forced to drag it with him for eternity, never stopping, and yet never making any ground. Marley is a spirit “doomed to wander through the world… and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness”.
Marley’s punishment is truly horrifying, and the result of squandering a life that could well have been turned to good use. Marley learned too late that any soul on earth “will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness”. Marley wasted his time in life, and was therefore condemned to waste for all time after death.
Scrooge was no better. In fact, said Marley of Scrooge’s chain: “it was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago”. If Scrooge was to avoid Marley’s terrible fate, he must reflect on his own sins and resolve to do good.
Scrooge was prone to more than one deadly sin, but his most obvious fault was his miserliness. Scrooge would not pay for anything not strictly necessary for him: he loved the cold and the dark – they cost him nothing. Christmas, in his view, was nothing more than a way of spending money while getting nothing in return; a way of “finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer”. Scrooge’s greed was his great fault, and it was because of his greed that he could love nothing else: his life, his fiancée, or even Christmas.
It was only through painful and thorough self-reflection that Scrooge pulled himself out of his own mire. Of course, it was not easy – Scrooge was forced to relive happy and painful memories, both of which were embittered by the passage of time and his own corruption. He was made to see the pain he daily inflicted upon good people, and the charity those same people exuded nonetheless. Finally, he was made to see the consequences for innocent lives of his greed, and how much he was truly hated.
Scrooge was redeemed because of his eventual willingness to reconsider his own actions, and to repent of his sins before his time was up. While this is an uplifting sentiment, one must not forget what Scrooge avoided.
A Christmas Carol is a grave warning against wasting one’s life. It should give us pause for thought. Let us each consider: how long is our own chain?
How many times in our lives – however short or long they may have been thus far – have we wasted time that could be spent making ourselves, others, or the world itself just a small bit better? How many times have we put off more important pursuits for the sake of scrolling endlessly on a mobile device? What would our chain look like? Would it resemble Marley’s, or would it be a steel complex of phones, computers, and drug vessels?
These are sombre prospects, but there is hope nonetheless. Let us take the advice written so wisely by Dickens; reflect on our past, our present, and our future. Let us recognise and atone for our mistakes, actively improve ourselves and our habits, and keep in mind the consequences of any of our actions. This Advent season, let us consider the state of our souls, and lift ourselves up from our sins and misdeeds in the hope of the coming of the Christ child. And let us remember those haunting words of Marley’s: “no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused”.
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Patrick Vincent writes from Dublin