While it’s often thought of as a children’s classic, Charles Dickens’s holiday favorite, “A Christmas Carol,” also contains an abiding message for adults. Rereading this story in 2006, 163 years after Dickens wrote it, lets readers wrestle with some of its profound message. Here’s a David Letterman-style list of my favorite adult themes in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.”
1. People are more important than things. In a material world, it’s sometimes hard to resist quantifying everything. The commercialization of Christmas, with the intense consumer buzz to buy, buy, buy can reinforce the message. But, in the end, people and things are incommensurable: You can’t put a price tag on a person.
2. Love matters most of all. “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being incomprehensible to himself” without love, once wrote the late Pope John Paul II. In Scrooge, we see the effect of trying to live without love: isolation. A broken engagement and alienation from his only nephew are but two examples of Scrooge’s attempt to live without love.
3. Love requires freedom. For love to be love, it must be free. The spirits never force Scrooge. They never plead with him. They just show him what was, what is and what will be. Scrooge can choose to “sponge away the writing on this stone,” or he can “persevere in certain ends” — the choice is his.
4. Choices have consequences. But while Scrooge may have choices, he can’t pick and choose the consequences of those choices. Choice is not some abstract principle hanging in the air, devoid of its own consequences. Scrooge could have chosen to remain self-centered, to continue pushing others away. But one can’t force somebody to mourn for him: He who shuns his fellow man in life is likely to have a very lonely funeral.
5. Truth cannot be evaded. Dickens is no moral relativist: Choices cannot be separated from the truth of their consequences. Ebenezer might feel sorry for himself as a youth abandoned by a hard father, left at school with only books as friends. But Scrooge cannot blame what he becomes on anybody but himself. That’s why Scrooge tries to get rid of the Ghost of Christmas Past by crushing him with a candle snuffer: The ghost’s light of truth, emanating from his head, is too much for Scrooge to bear.
6. Life is sacred. When the gentlemen come to Scrooge’s office, soliciting gifts for the needy, Scrooge wantonly dismisses the destitute, saying they should die to “decrease the surplus population.” It’s easy to talk about nameless, anonymous surpluses. But life is never faceless or anonymous. When the “surplus population” acquires the face of Tiny Tim, even Scrooge feels pity.
7. Feelings require action. The fact Scrooge pities Bob Cratchit’s sickly boy isn’t enough for the Ghost of Christmas Present. Rather than comforting him, the spirit rubs the salt even deeper, throwing Scrooge’s own words about surplus populations back in his face. Scrooge’s pleadings are not enough: unless things change, unless something is done, the child will die.
8. Man is social. No man is a rock, unless he first turns his heart stony. For better or worse, the affairs of humanity are woven into one tapestry, whose design is made more attractive or ugly by its individual elements. Scrooge tried to fight his social obligations; too late, Marley can only lament “mankind was my business.” When Marley exitsScrooge’s room, to join the ghosts whirling in the wind, there’s a particularly touching scene of a ghost, lugging a safe around with him, weeping that he can now no longer do anything for a destitute mother and her waif on a doorstep. But that’s the business of life.
9. Death puts things in perspective. It’s hard to imagine that, seeing his lonely past and his isolated present, Scrooge didn’t figure out early who was the abandoned corpse on his bed. But until the bitter end — until he came face to face with his own tombstone — Ebenezer Scrooge did his past to avoid changing his ways. Like St. Augustine, Scrooge could pray: “Lord, convert me — tomorrow!” But a man has only a certain quota of tomorrows, not for refill.
Kids may thrill to the ghosts and cheer Tiny Tim, but “A Christmas Carol” has a profound message for those of us (long) over the age of majority. God bless us all, everyone!
John Grondelski is the former associate dean of the school of theology at Seton Hall University.
