A World of Want
Lent & Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol? During Lent?! Yes, you read that correctly. But, surely we’re just mixing up our liturgical seasons? Perhaps, but it seems pertinent here to quote T.S. Eliot’s East Coker: ‘in my end is my beginning’, and we might add that in the beginning, we may also find the end. In the life of Our Lord, the reality of the Cross is always present, even in the tender arms of the Nativity. Similarly, in the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, the warm delight of his blossoming into love and Christmas cheer is impossible without the interference of a quite different reality, a dark reality, stark and unflinching as death: the reality of being in want. This strikes—with particular force—a note that is profoundly pertinent to our understanding of the penitential exercise we have so recently begun.
One week into your Lenten observance, you may not yet have struck this particular note yourself. You may still be ‘going strong’. Then, maybe the first week is harder for you, before you’ve learned to live with your new discipline, grown used to it? Either way, somewhere in this 40-Day desert, you will likely encounter this questionable friend, this feeling of being in want. Like Scrooge, you will experience what you are so keenly missing, and—with any luck—you will let it lead you to the recognition that you are missing a great deal more than chocolate.
Charles Dickens was a master of ‘want’; his portrayals of poverty are legendary, and he is commonly recognized as the premier exposer of industrial London’s brutish shortfalls. In Oliver Twist, we encounter the workhouse—the last place for the destitute, the orphan and the widow in an economy that ignores human dignity. We see young boys worked, quite literally, to death and the allure of a life of petty crime by comparison, the questionable family of a lesser evil represented by Fagin’s false fatherhood.
In the famous opening of Bleak House, we can all but smell the decaying parchment of the “bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before”[1] the Court of Chancery as it steams on in the relentless inevitability of a system that has seemingly lost sight of its purpose and exists only for the carrying out of its ‘business’, churning through the life of its wards and protectorates with mechanical indifference.
Not only this, but Dickens also spares no care for the excesses of the wealthy that contribute to this vicious depravation. In the same Bleak House, we see the tireless efforts of the ‘charitable’, whose works have little to do with the lives wasting away in front of them. It is hard to escape the scene of a young mother whose child dies ruthlessly in her arms during a ‘charitable’ visit in amongst relentless filth and lectures on neighborliness.
‘Bleak’ is indeed an ideal word for these aspects of Dickens’ world.
This is not all of Dickens’ world, however, and to see only these things would be to miss the treasure of it altogether. For this is only one kind of want, a vicious poverty of destitution. There is another. A Christmas Carol carries the secret, and that is why it is an apt choice for a reflection on the Season of Lent.
This secret lies in the house of Bob Cratchit.
Despite being the man with the greatest causes for complaint, Bob Cratchit is relentless in his patience, generosity and even-temperedness. Despite his meager livelihood, difficult employer and ailing young son, Tim, Cratchit finds reasons for joy and an openness of heart that envelopes even Scrooge.
Or is it really ‘despite’?
What if we consider for a moment the potentiality that it is not ‘despite’ his poverty, but because of it that Bob Cratchit is the man that he is?
Alongside the traditional dichotomy between rich and poor that Dickens paints in his works, there is a startling paradox that emerges almost every time: while the wealthy possess all the comforts and avoid the stark fates of the poor, they are almost universally the most unhappy. Think of Miss Haversham in Great Expectations funneling all her wealth into the wounded hole left in her heart, or Pip being utterly blinded by the arrival of an unexpected inheritance, drawn into a world of total illusion. Or, indeed, think of Ebenezer Scrooge, counting his pennies and whiling away his miserable hours.
It is clear that, for Charles Dickens, wealth is something with a profound ability to hide reality and destroy happiness.
By contrast, the Cratchits are able to see life as it really is and, through Tiny Tim, to grow into a profound love that touches the deepest parts of the human heart, realizing our immense potential for self-gift—and utterly free of any assistance from material wealth.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”[2] While purity has come to take on a particular meaning in our culture, narrowed down to its sexual relation, the expanse of this Beatitude is visible in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Cleared of the blindness of his self-interested greed, Scrooge is able first to experience the absolute agony of his all-consuming selfishness, and then the overwhelming hope that it might not be the end of the matter for him. By experiencing his want, he is yet able to envision its remedy and still has time to pursue it before he is condemned to the same shackles his partner Jacob Marley “forged in life… link by link, and yard by yard… [girding] it on of [his] own free will, and of [his] own free will [wearing] it.”[3]
The graced visions that Scrooge is granted help him to see, with Marley, that "[m]ankind [is his] business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, [are], all, [his] business. The deals of [his] trade… but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of [his] business!”[4] And, beyond this, the God who is the Source of all Christmas cheer, who granted the visions in the first place, and who reaches out to save Scrooge’s failing soul before it is too late.
It is God who touches Scrooge with the lancing pain of being in want, that he might come to know a greater wealth. Similarly, this Season of Lent gives us the chance to live in want, to take upon ourselves this healing mercy and look at that which matters most—the destiny of every human soul to live in union with their Heavenly Father, and in communion with all the saints. As nuns, we live this reality daily thanks to our vow of voluntary poverty, choosing—if we live it well—to set aside the distorting view of worldly comforts for a starker but realer vision of what truly is. During Lent particularly, we are invited with all the faithful to take on this challenge, or this gift really, of living in a world of want.
[1] Dickens, Bleak House, pg 1.
[2] Matthew 5:8.
[3] Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 1, ‘Marley’s Ghost’.
[4] Ibid.
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