I’ve been re-reading ‘A Christmas Carol’, and the way it resonates with present day Britain is quite remarkable. As Christmas approaches, Scrooge sits in his counting house, as he does every day, obsessed with his accounts and balancing the books, untouched and unmoved by the poverty all around him.
I’ve been re-reading ‘A Christmas Carol’, and the way it resonates with present day Britain is quite remarkable. As Christmas approaches, Scrooge sits in his counting house, as he does every day, obsessed with his accounts and balancing the books, untouched and unmoved by the poverty all around him.
Two charitable gentlemen arrive, asking Scrooge for a contribution to help the poor and destitute, saying, “Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.’
Scrooge replies that there are workhouses, and “those who are badly off must go there.” When he is told that ‘Many can’t go there, and many would rather die.’ he replies, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
But just as he captures perfectly the mean-spiritedness of Scrooge, Dickens is equally brilliant at conveying the generosity of spirit of other characters. In the face of Scrooge’s meanness, his nephew says that Christmas is the time, “when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
Just as we have modern equivalents of Scrooge, thankfully we also have many more equivalents of his nephew, numerous examples of kindness and generosity around us this Christmas. Some are public, like the cafes and pubs opening their doors to the poor and homeless to give them a free meal in warm surroundings. Some are quietly and privately done, as people visit the lonely, the bereaved, the old and the sick to offer friendship and much-needed company.
As we approach a new year, a year in which a General Election will determine the course our country takes, we all have our part to play in charting that course. I pray that the spirit of Christmas, in which every person, without exception, is seen as a fragile fellow passenger to the grave, will inform the choices we make. And as Tiny Tim said, ‘God Bless Us, Every One!’
* More on Christmas from Ekklesia here: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/christmas
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© Bernadette Meaden has written about political, religious and social issues for some years, and is strongly influenced by Christian Socialism, liberation theology and the Catholic Worker movement. She is an Ekklesia associate and regular contributor. You can follow her on Twitter: @BernaMeaden