The Ghost of Christmas Future (Stave Four)

 So I am getting to the end of the book – and the days of Christmas are going by too fast. There were several mistakes in yesterday’s entry – written too hurriedly. I have corrected them all, I think.

 

     The contrast between the Cratchit family grieving over the death of Tiny Tim at his wake – his body is in another room – and the contempt in which the body of the dead Scrooge is held is the most striking part of this stave for me. Grief is an expression of love; when real, it concentrates love and makes love real. (Grief can of course be sentimental – displays of grief can be used to attract attention to oneself, for instance. In that case, it reveals nothing about the deceased person. It can be a conventional display of feeling for public consumption. Etc.) But there is no doubt that the Cratchit's grief is profound because their love was profound. Like all forms of love, it binds the Cratchits together. Tiny Tim draws them together even in death. And the body of Tiny Tim, bereft of life, still retains a kind of dignity, for lack of a better word:

He [Bob] left the room, and went up-stairs into the room above, which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas. There was a chair set close beside the child, and there were signs of someone having been there lately. Poor Bob sat down in it, and when he had thought a little and composed himself, he kissed the little face.

    The narrator comments: “Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from God!”   And Christmas is about the Incarnation – God becoming a little child. And then again the passage read by Peter from Mark: Then He took a little child and set him in the midst of them. And when He had taken him in His arms, He said to them, “Whoever receives one of these little children in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me…. The death of this child at Christmas is something of a mystery. But the fact that Scrooge had it in his power to prevent this death is a powerful reminder of the meaning of the life he lived.

    Scrooge had asked the spirit “Let me see some tenderness connected with a death” because – unknown to himself – he had been horrified with the contempt with which his own body had been treated. Listening in while various housekeepers pawn off stuff they had taken from the house – even taking a shirt from his corpse – we get this description:

Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror. As they sat grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by the old man’s [the pawnbroker] lamp, he view them with a detestation and disgust which could hardly have been greater though they had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse itself.

Scrooge was a human being and as such his body should have been treated with dignity. The behavior he is witnessing no doubt de-means his corpse. But you can’t blame the people. Scrooge had extinguished the humanity in himself. He had thus made his humanity invisible to those around him. And it is often so that the wrong one person does to another damages them by making them into the image of the wrong-doing. These people were just acting like little Scrooges.

    What we get with this image of Scrooge’s corpse is humanity when it has been stripped of all the reality Christmas stands for. Or it is humanity as seen from the perspective of a pure capitalism bare of any humanity. (I fear that in our own time. And in that connection it is depressing to study the changing meanings of the dead body and the ways of honoring it – or dishonoring it.)

  Recall Fred’s praise of Christmas at the beginning:

   …[Christmas is] the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them [who are those people today?] as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on different journeys.

The death of a human being is a profound mystery when seen in the light of love; it is something to be marketed when seen in the light of a Scrooge. To share that fate would bind us in fellowship if only we didn’t so often – how to overcome it?! – walk around with blinders on, with shut-up hearts? That seems worthy of meditation at Christmas time.