Rehabilitating Scrooge

    At this time of year, exposed to endless retellings of A Christmas Carol from productions as diverse as the Muppets to the Alastair Sim 1951 classic version to Jim Carrey's recent film, I find myself thinking a lot about Ebenezer Scrooge, about what he means to the modern zeitgeist and that of Dickensian London. He is a character about whom I am really conflicted and can never quite pin down.
    To start with, his name has gone the long way round in giving him a bum rap. "Scrooge" has come to mean a miserly curmudgeon in our days, but in the English of  Dickens' day it meant to squeeze, so the surname Scrooge would carry the meaning of squeezing rather than miserliness. As in squeezing or pinching pennies, or wringing work out of his clerk, or payments out of his debtors. And how unfair that the name Scrooge has come to mean an angry and cheap old man when if you were to give justice to the conclusion of the book it might stand for reborn or redeemed or newfound generosity of spirit.
    But WHY has Scrooge come about, to keep Christmas like no other, to be kindly and generous? This is where another conflict comes in. From a quick read of the book, it appears that Scrooge's motivation is to escape a quick and ignominious end. Time and again he entreats the Spirits who haunt him "Can I still have the power to change my future?" after being confronted with visions of business associates speaking harshly of him after death, of cackling servants who steal and sell his few possessions as soon as he is dead, of his lonely and neglected grave. Jailhouse conversions are not always impressive; Scrooge turning to the path of family and friends and celebration rather than continuing in his solitary misery because he is given a vision that he will die unmourned and unloved is hardly stirring. It is simply self-interest. What glory is there in coming to the right path simply to avoid the wrong? If you want me to celebrate Scrooge's great redemption you had better do better than dodging an evil end.
    But wait!but see!but read!-there is more, there is more lurking when you read further. Scrooge's REAL redemption comes not through following his own enlightened self-interest, but through the welfare of others. His heartstrings-and ours-are stirred not by his surface acceptance of Christmas, but by his appeal to others in his life. His shame at the shabby manner in which he has treated his nephew Fred, his horror at the idea that Tiny Tim will surely die if he does not receive help, and his disgrace at the memory of his brusque treatment of the men out collecting donations for the poor-these have more to do with his redemption. When Dickens tells us that he kept Christmas as well as anyone could, we know in our hearts that this phrase has little to do with decorating a tree or buying gifts or attending church, but in the works which his newly realized love wrought.
     So I should worry less about Scrooge's motivation in self-improvement and let him work out his salvation in his own manner. Accordingly, I should not worry about others who are motivated to seek God or to do good in order to dodge hellfire and damnation, or in order to look good to other people. After all, EVEN IF a huge corporation decides to run a downtown soup kitchen in order to increase its public image before a major trial for public fraud commences, a few lives still may be blessed by full bellies no matter the motivation. As Jesus noted, those not against us are for us. Who am I to question anyone else? I have plenty of my own to work out.
    The power of A Christmas Carol is in its ability to reach out to all of us after more than a century and bring our faith and actions into concert through its fable. Keeping Christmas is not only the self-interested ploy to escape shame and death and humiliation, but a joyful manifestation of all that makes us brothers and sisters in life. To extend a hand to each other, all the year long and not just for one day. To celebrate together, to share burdens together, to believe and to work together.
     To remember that  "It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour."
   ....especially when watching the Muppet version-there is nothing so full of laughter and good-humour as a Muppet.