It’s December, in the Advent season and time for another reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
My fascination with that poignant story began the week before Christmas when I was eight years old and NBC aired for the first time “Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol.” It was an animated adaptation of Dickens’ classic work and started my annual reexamination of the story in various forms, including the written story, and many film versions made since 1935 starring such notables as Seymour Hicks, Reginald Owen, Alistair Sim, George C. Scott, Michael Caine, Patrick Stuart and Jim Carrey in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge.
One of my favorites in recent years is the Patrick Stuart version. I like it because it picks up a bit of Dickens’ writing often only pictorially displayed in other versions.
In A Christmas Carol, as Marley’s ghost exits Scrooge’s dwelling by the open window, Dickens writes: “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; some few … were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. 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 doorstep. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.”
While we are living, we all have the power to interfere for good, to do good in human matters. Those specters of the dead in Dickens’ novella had lost that power forever and such was the source of so much of their misery. It is perhaps too fine a point to debate whether we shall have that power after death, as St. Therese the Little Flower and the other saints do. But our chance of exercising it after we die will be much stronger if we have exercised it before we die.
As we prepare for Christ’s coming at the end of time and at Christmas, consider that we can interfere for good in human matters by supporting the work of our Catholic Charities agencies: JOIN, the St. Francis Evangelization Center in McArthur, Catholic Social Services, St. Stephen’ s Community House, St. Vincent Family Services and the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Many of these organizations have a Christmas appeal that supports their efforts to feed, clothe, heal, accompany and empower the poor and vulnerable. You can find links to these organizations on the diocesan website, http://columbuscatholic.org.
You can also support them by generously donating to the Christmas Collection for diocesan charities on Christmas Day, Dec. 25. If you are an online giver, you may need to open your online account and designate a specific gift for the Charities collection. You can also drop a donation in an envelope labeled Christmas Charities Collection and put it in the collection basket at your parish on Christmas Day.
As we prepare for the coming of the Lord, use the power that you have today to do good!