Lessons from a Christmas Carol


We were recently in Penang for the weekend, and managed to catch Robert Zemeckis' Christmas Carol. It is quite a disturbing Christmas Carol, with a number of scary images (it opens with the image of Jacob Marley dead in his coffin with coins over his eyes!), so it's not a kids show by any stretch of the imagination. My kids were noticeably sober when we got out, 3D glasses notwithstanding, and frankly so was I!

Anyway, the familiar lessons of the Christmas Carol story continue to be thought provoking today. One particularly stuck in my mind - perhaps because it was the most disturbing! Ebenezer Scrooge's first encounter of Christmas Eve is with the ghost of Jacob Marley, his former business partner. Jacob Marley is bound with heavy chains to his moneyboxes, which he is cursed to haul around. The conversation Jacob Marley has with Scrooge is quite illuminating.

====================

Jacob Marley: I wear the chain I forged in life! I made it link by link and yard by yard! I gartered it on of my own free will and by my own free will, I wore it!

Ebenezer Scrooge: You have my sympathy.

Jacob Marley: Ah! You do not know the weight and length of strong chain you bear yourself! It was as full and as long as this seven Christmas eves ago and you have labored on it since. Ah, it is a ponderous chain!

====================

How scarily true is that? So many of us create, yard by yard, and link by link, our own heavy chains, to our selfish desires and vain ambitions. And even as we cast our judgmental eyes on others around us, we do not realise what a heavy chain we ourselves bear, and worse, continually build!

In a scene shortly thereafter, Jacob Marley bids farewell to Ebenezer Scrooge, and opening the window, shows him the crowd of ghosts, similarly chained, but to various other things of the world, crying and lamenting in the streets.

====================

Jacob Marley: It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men! If it goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death! It is doomed to wander through the world! Oh, woe is me! And witness what it cannot share but MIGHT HAVE SHARED on Earth and turned to happiness!

...

Jacob Marley: Look to see me no more. But look here [at the other ghosts], that you may remember for your own sake what has passed between us!

Ebenezer: Why do they lament?

Jacob Marley: They seek to interfere for good in human matters, and have lost their power forever.

====================

What Charles Dickens was saying is that all men have a duty to do good to other men, and that the curse of the ghosts was to wander through the world and witness what it can no longer do, but might have done to turn to happiness. In other words, the ghosts are cursed to forever regret the good they should have done.

In some ways it is a parallel to what the Bible records of the conversation between the beggar Lazarus, the rich man and Abraham. Luke 16:25 records that the rich man asked for relief as he was in torment in hell, and Abraham replied "Remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from from here to you cannot, not can anyone cross over from there to us." It's important to note that the beggar Lazarus was at the rich man's gate everyday, meaning that the rich man could have helped but didn't - the point being made is that the rich man had no love for his fellow man, not that the rich man was rich per se. Having said that, yo those whom much is given, much is expected (Luke 12:48).

Let's resolve to remember the lessons of Christmas, the great gifts and blessings God has given to those of us lucky enough to be living here in Singapore, to count our blessings, whether it is jobs, health or family etc. and remember what He expects of us. To love our neighbour as ourselves.

I'll close with this final quote from Dickens:

====================

Jacob Marley: In life, my spirit never rose beyond the limits of our money-changing holes! Now I am doomed to wander without rest or peace, incessant torture and remorse!

Ebenezer: But it was only that you were a good man of business, Jacob!

Jacob Marley: BUSINESS? 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!"

====================

This Christmas, let's do God's business, and He will take care of ours!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bullying? Stand up!

Image
When I was a kid, I remember being bullied a fair bit.  I was small for my age, bespectacled, shy.    The teachers didn't help by putting a target on my back by making me Vice Head Prefect.  I would get my stuff just taken away from me by bigger kids, dragged out into the field to be tickled until I collapsed (much less fun than it sounds), and pushed into the storm drains.  Not all the kids were full-blown bullies of course.  But I remember some of them standing by, and politely holding my spectacles (so they wouldn't be broken) while the bullies did their work on me. Most of this stopped when I got to secondary school, where a much larger proportion of my fellow students were now just as nerdy!  And of course I grew up too.  I don't really look back on those days with any kind of animosity, because I think it never occurred to me that it was unusual.  But I do think my experience made me a bit more sympathetic about people around me who...
Read more

Life as a pie chart

Image
Someone told me recently about a "life exercise" in which one compiles all the stuff that makes up your life, and puts it in a pie chart.  So let's say for me, something like this. The idea is to visually demonstrate to myself that, in the event I lose one of these things, then I can see that, hey life is not so bad, that wasn't such a big deal.  Say for example, if I suffered a blown ACL, and couldn't run or play basketball any more, like this: At first blush - I'd say, hey, I still have my wife, children, parents, career, church life - so, chin up, things are not so bad.  Pretty good life visualisation tool to bring some optimism back into play! ... But what if, a month later, something happens at work, and boom, career gets sidetracked, I lose my job, or get put in cold storage somewhere, like this: Oops, now only half my life is left!  With only half of life's meaning left to me, what do I do? And what if something happens to...
Read more

Family AND Team

Image
I heard an interesting viewpoint this weekend. A family is not inherently a team. Hmm.  Sometimes at work, often in church, and most of the time at home, you hear people say to each other that we are family. And often, we really are. We care for each other above and beyond transactional matters.  It matters to me when my colleagues and cell group members (and of course my actual family members) go through illnesses or family issues or work challenges. I root for their success at presentations and projects and relationships. I care about what they care about, even if it has little direct impact on my own life. In a way, a family is sort of an amalgam of people who support each other in pursuit of each member's personal goals. For example, as a father, I support my children in their academic, career and ministry goals. But where they go to school, the grades they get, and the careers and ministries they build - they're really their goals, not mine.  Ditto for my role as a c...
Read more