Wednesday, December 8, 2010

A Christmas Carol

Re-reading Charles' Dickens A Christmas Carol at the moment.  I've been reflecting on what sort of Christianity it reveals.  In the basic 'moral' of the story, Scrooge's Zacchaeus-like (see Luke 19) conversion from "the love of money [which] is a root of all kinds of evil" (1 Timothy 6:10) to open-handed generosity, the narrator demonstrates a high regard for the New Testament's ethical teaching. 

Elsewhere, there is a degree of scepticism towards some of the manifestations of institutional Christianity, as in this conversation between Scrooge and the second of the Three Spirits (the ghost of Christmas Present):
In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of wet above each baker’s oven; where the pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.
      ‘Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from your torch?’ asked Scrooge.
      ‘There is. My own.’
      ‘Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?’ asked Scrooge.
      ‘To any kindly given. To a poor one most.’
      ‘Why to a poor one most?’ asked Scrooge.
      ‘Because it needs it most.’
      ‘Spirit,’ said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought, ‘I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent enjoyment.’
      ‘I!’ cried the Spirit.
      ‘You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,’ said Scrooge. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
      ‘I!’ cried the Spirit.
      ‘You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?’ said Scrooge. ‘And it comes to the same thing.’
      ‘I seek!’ exclaimed the Spirit.
      ‘Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,’ said Scrooge.
      ‘There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the Spirit, ‘who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’
      Scrooge promised that he would;
True Christianity, within A Christmas Carol, is found in an everyday practical care for the poor and not pious legalism, perhaps reflecting Jesus' comment: "The poor you will always have with you" (Matthew 26:11).  Sunday is not kept sacred by taking away the possibility of a hot meal from the deprived.  Elsewhere, there's an echo of Jesus' identification of being a Christian with care for the poor: ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Matthew 25:40):
‘And how did little Tim behave?’ asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.
      ‘As good as gold,’ said Bob, ‘and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.’
      Bob’s voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.
So, for me, Dickens' morality tale portrays a Christianity strongly rooted in practical ethical action towards an ever-present poor - heaven in ordinary once more.