Stave One of Charles
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol resounds
with themes common to our readings this past weekend. You may recall that Scrooge returns home one
night to discover, first, his former partner Jacob Marley’s face staring at him
from the door knocker, and then, to his surprise, Marley himself, come to pay a
visit from the great beyond.
What is most shocking
to Scrooge is Marley’s appearance, particularly the chain… clasped about his middle, made of cash-boxes, keys,
padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. When Scrooge inquires, Marley responds, 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.
Its pattern is not strange to Scrooge, Marley’s miserly partner.
Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed, Marley cries, not to know, that ages of incessant
labour, 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 moral life too
short for its vast means of usefulness.
Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one’s life’s
opportunities misused! Yes such was
I! Oh!
such was I!
Scrooge is
baffled: But you were always a good man of business, Jacob, he says.
Business! replies Marley’s ghost, Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity,
mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of
water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!
Is there not an
echo here of the story of the rich man of Luke's Gospel (often referred to as “Dives”) who failed to see poor Lazarus sitting at his gate, until the beggar was installed
in the bosom of Abraham while the rich
man suffered in the netherworld, filled with regret for all he failed to do
during his life on earth? Woe to the complacent in Zion, Amos
warns... Would that we all recognize in time, as
Marley’s Ghost did too late, that Mankind is our business! And the
common welfare is our business,
too.
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