By GEORGE A. KENDALL
Whenever the subject of Christmas comes into my mind, it is almost invariably followed by the thought of Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol, which I have been reading and rereading since I was 13 years old. It is the story of a man imprisoned in himself by his own greed, yet freed in the end by a miracle of grace (which is always a miracle). The following thoughts will, I hope, make my meaning clearer.
One way to think of the disorder of our times is to see it as a reversal of the roles of the normal and the perverted, treating the latter as the norm, the “default setting,” so to speak, and treating the former as the abnormal, the deviant. I have written before about how this happens in the case of epistemology, the theory of how the mind knows the world. In a normal universe, there are rational beings who are by nature capable of knowing the world, which manifests itself to them as a gift. In the abnormal universe posited by today’s ideologues, the split between the mind and the world is the default setting.
This has led to the construction of elaborate systems which expend huge amounts of mental energy looking for ways to bridge the gap — all of it a waste of time if there never was a gap in the first place.
We do similar things when it comes to our efforts to understand who and what we are and what is good and not so good for us — our anthropology or science of man. To all sane people, a human being is someone who is born into a world not made by him and finds himself in a whole network of rights and duties, relationships to family, community, and God, none of which he ever had the opportunity to choose for himself, but which nonetheless constitute the structure of reality in which he is who he is. And this is what human normality is. We are, as Anthony Esolen likes to say, inheritors. We don’t make our world, it is a gift.
But our ideologues think otherwise. To people like Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, or the unspeakable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a/k/a AOC), the inheritance outlined above is something we are free to throw into the dustbin of history as soon as we are old enough to be aware of it. That means our families, our communities, our relationship to God, and so on. All these primary relationships are, to them, structures of repression which we need to throw off. Our genuine, “authentic” humanity consists of living as autonomous individuals, who decide for themselves what is or is not true, what is or is not good or right, moral or immoral, and so on.
An autonomous man does not have to accept the fact that he was born male and that is the end of it. Instead, he can decide he is a woman and bully others into accepting him as one. If that is not enough, he can always have himself carved up into something that looks (sort of) like a woman. Autonomous individuals are, of course, free to choose their relationships and end them when they are no longer getting anything out of them, no matter how much suffering this may inflict on the other person.
For that matter, if an autonomous woman resents being “forced” to be a mother to her unborn child, she can just kill it, and we are now in the process of making it legal to do the same to those already born.
How does all this tie in with Ebenezer Scrooge? Well, Scrooge, as Dickens portrays him, is a classic case of a modern man who has made the choice to be an autonomous individual, committing himself only to those relationships that he chooses. He is so far gone in this choice that he really does not seem to believe in any relationships not reducible to buying and selling. Everything is bought and paid for, and there is no such thing as a gift.
This is why he detests Christmas so much. If anything has ever been a pure gift, it has to be the coming of Christ, the Incarnation of the Word of God, into the world for us. Scrooge rejects it, not just because it is a gift offered to him, but because it calls him, in receiving the gift, to in turn, give himself to God and neighbor. For him, this would be a structure of repression and a threat to his autonomy. Hence, his response to it can only be, “Bah! Humbug!”
And look at his other relationships. He has no family, other than his nephew Fred, who tries hard to be kind to him and draw him out of the pit in which he has imprisoned himself, and he angrily rejects him. His greed caused him to lose the young woman who once loved him. He has no friends, just people he does business with. He refuses to contribute to a charitable fund to help the poor, on grounds that he already contributes, albeit involuntarily, to the support of public institutions which are supposed to help the poor but do so in a cold-blooded, inhuman, bureaucratic way. And of course his relationship to Bob Cratchit, his clerk, is a case study in the reduction of a relationship to the buying and selling of labor.
The Cratchit family is a sharp contrast to all this. They have almost nothing, yet they somehow find ways to give small gifts to one another at Christmastime, and, more important, they are a gift to one another. They epitomize the self-giving love which is at the center of the Gospel, and which the self-imprisoned Scrooge so sadly lacks. The message of Christmas is that the spirit is called to go forth, to God and man, in love, as God Himself did in the Incarnation.
Scrooge, before his joyful transformation, represents the spiritual disease of our age, in which men are locked up in themselves and it is their own doing. The chains that bind both Scrooge and Marley, chains which they themselves have made are an apt symbol of this reality. The French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos sees Hell as being no longer able to love, and that about sums it up.
We fallen people love to build cages for ourselves, then take up residence in them, and tell ourselves that these cages are all there is. But the Gospel message tells us that we do not have to remain in those cages. Here we need only reflect on the passage from Isaiah which Jesus proclaims in the synagogue at Nazareth, identifying it with His mission:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim the good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim release to the captives, and to give sight to the blind, to set captives free, to proclaim the acceptable day of the Lord” (Luke 4:18-19).
Christ comes to set the prisoners free, and this means not just those imprisoned by others, but those imprisoned by themselves. May the glorious freedom of the children of God be ours, at Christmastime and forever!
(© 2019 George A. Kendall)
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress