The air was filled with phantoms,
wandering hither and thither in restless haste,
and moaning as they went.
Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost.
Many had been personally known to Scrooge.
He had been quite familiar with one old ghost
in a white waistcoat,
with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle,
who cried piteously at being unable to assist
a wretched woman with an infant
whom it saw below upon a door-step.
The misery with them all was, clearly,
that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters,
and had lost the power forever."
Yesterday I got back to working lines for A Christmas Carol, and this has stayed with me since. "They sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever." Dickens' view of eternal torment wasn't physical punishment, not inescapable pain or unquenchable thirst or unending hunger - except the thirst and hunger to care for people. Not just to care ABOUT people, which in fact the ghosts could do now infinitely more than they did in life, but to care FOR them; practically, physically, personally. To see suffering and to be unable to help. That was Dickens' vision of hell. We hear the cheery story of Scrooge waking up a changed man and delight in his new-found happiness, and so we should; after all, we have the capacity to care, and the story leads us to care about old Ebenezer (by way of first caring about young Ebenezer), and he has been given a second chance. But perhaps Scrooge's change of heart is easier to take home with us than his change of life. And I think that's what the story asks of us.
With that on my mind, I woke this morning and thought of W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe, and the movie that came from it, Field of Dreams. I remembered the mysterious voice that spoke to Ray Kinsella and gave him his assignment.
"Ease his pain."
You thought I was going to say, "If you build it, he will come." (Or, as it's usually remembered, "If you build it, they will come." But that's fine. It was for Shoeless Joe, but it was also for Chick Gandel and Buck Weaver and Eddie Cicotte and Happy Felsch, and for the people in that string of cars J.D. Salinger dreams up). Interesting that's the line everybody thinks of when they think of that story - because it lines up so neatly with all Hollywood's other "dare to dream" movies, the Horatio Alger / Walt Disney American entrepeneurial fantasy that if we just follow our passion we can have what we want.
But how conveniently we forget the second part of Kinsella's calling; "ease his pain." He's to leave behind that adorable daughter and that sexy freckled wife and that ball field of his dreams and drive far from the cornfields of Iowa to kidnap a world-hating recluse and take him to a ballgame. It's not just about Ray's happiness; it's about what Ray can do - has to do? - to ease other folks' unhappiness.
And I think of the state of Christianity in our time, and more broadly the tenor of "spirituality" that so many people seem to have in mind, self-care and life balance and Me Time and the particulars of my own spiritual journey. (I'm talking to myself here as much as anybody else). And a lot of it sounds pretty damned self-serving. And not so often is it about sacrifice, about what we're called on to do for the wretched woman on a doorstep, or the bitter recluse, or the shamed and exiled ballplayer, or... I mean, beyond just posting our alarm or outrage on the internet.
Yes, God loves us, and it's fine to grab hold of that elusive truth and hold onto it and know that we're okay, and that we'll be okay. And for some of us, or for most of us at some point in our life, that's all we can manage; to hold on. To grab that oxygen mask and breathe in what we need to stay alive, before we're ready to share it with the infant on our lap.
But Jesus didn't spend a ton of time dwelling on that. Once he gets that good news into us, he mostly moves on to the question of what comes next. Okay, you've got your field of dreams; now ease his pain. You've woken up - you've WOKEN UP, for God's sake! when you thought you were dead and buried in a dreary cemetery, "walled in by houses, overrun by grass and weeds, choked up with too much burying" - Tiny Tim hasn't died yet. And what are you going to do about that?
There's your "happily ever after."
