Stephen Houston
"I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of Humour with themselves, with the season, with each other or with me…"
Thus reads the cover of the first editions of ‘A Christmas Carol,' published in December 1843.
John Charles Huffam Dickens was born in 1812 and died of a stroke in 1870. He is buried in Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey, which I note from the bulletin was dedicated 939 years ago today.
My work does not take me to the most hopeful areas of the world. I meet many people at the worst moments of their lives - after floods, earthquakes or during wars. I often find readings such as Job or Jeremiah oddly encouraging. It reminds me that none of this is new to the period of history in which I happen to live.
I also find it comforting to walk through old cemeteries and look at the family plots and the names and dates on the tombstones: the men who are buried beside two or even three wives because of the difficulties of childbirth; the four children in one family who died within two weeks of each other during an epidemic of a childhood disease that we now immunize against. And if I think my own life has some difficulties at the moment, I am reminded as I read the names of the generations of a family that whatever problems may currently be confronting me will also soon fade into the past.
Floods and earthquakes can be attributed to God or nature. But wars are a distinctly human activity. For the past twenty years, for the most part, wars have been conducted against civilians. The situation in western Sudan, the country where Gloria and I lived for the past year, gets worse by the day. Burning of villages, murder and rape are literally everyday occurrences. Millions have been driven from their homes, and there is no end in sight.
In the Balkans people explain 21st century problems beginning at the battle of Kosovo-Pojo in 1389. How can there be hope for change when ancient hatreds are so close to the surface?
The prophet Jeremiah enquires…"Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil." (Jeremiah 13:23)
He is saying that character is very enduring. Many a person has moved from one location to another to escape their past, only to find that it moved with them. Employers check references on the assumption that a person's previous behavior is a reliable indicator of how they will be in the future. Police keep criminal records for the same reason.
At this time of year, the Ghosts of Christmas past often visit us, bearing both joyful and painful memories.
Christmas 1974: Gloria and I were in Asmara in what is now Eritrea. Emperor Haile Selaissie had been overthrown, the news commonly reported bombs going off in the city. Three students were found in their beds, strangled with wire. Gloria was taking care of an eighteen-month-old girl named Fekadu Mehari, while she was recovering from cataract surgery. Her mother had died when she was born, and her father had disappeared in the fighting. To keep a short story short, we made a decision, and nine days later, thanks to the interventions of a High Court judge, the doctor in charge of the hospital, and her uncle, we had a birth certificate, an adoption certificate and exit visa. Within three weeks, we were evacuated out of the country. Most of the time Gloria and I think it was a good decision. I am sure Ghenette has her own opinions!
Christmas Day 1995: our family was invited to Dennis G and Martha W's for Christmas dinner, and a very pleasant afternoon with their family. After we returned home, Gloria had a phone call from her mother telling us that her Dad had died about noon. Because it was Christmas, almost all of the immediate family was able to travel to Abbotsford for the funeral. His death was not a surprise. And Gloria had been able to spend a couple of months with her Dad and Mom.
Not all was joyful and triumphant at the first Christmas either. Mary and Joseph had to travel just as she was about to deliver, because a Governor decided to have people registered to ensure that the taxes were being collected. Then the decision of the Wise Men to enquire at the court of Herod, led directly to the slaughter of every male child under the age of two years - to avert future political problems.
Now back to the ‘Ghost of an Idea' raised by Dickens. In the story Ebenezer Scrooge is a grasping, cold-hearted miser whose view of Christmas is summarized by ‘Bah! Humbug!' However, his dead business partner Marley appears to him and tells him that the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future will visit him in bed at night, whether he likes it or not! The Ghost of Christmas Future is especially grim as it shows him his own death.
Ebenezer Scrooge awakes resolved to be a different man. He sets about to change what would have been, exclaiming excitedly "the shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will."
In our day and age, we do not believe at all that the future is fixed. Instead, we often hope that somewhere, somehow, someone is in charge. As children, many of us think that someone with our interests at heart is in control of events around us. However, as we become older we find this is becomes less obvious. The Old Testament book of Job becomes deeply disturbing. For here is a story of a righteous man whom God, in consultation with some Evil Power decides to destroy. Job's possessions, his family and his own health are all taken away. No reason or explanation for this is ever given. The Master of the Universe does not explain to human beings.
Why would the Jewish rabbis have retained such a terrible account in their sacred writings?
Over the years, I have heard hundreds of people, after disaster destroyed their communities and their families, try to understand why. Muslims in Turkey, Hindus in Gujarat India, Christians in southern Mozambique. After a flood or an earthquake people inevitably ask why. A common answer is that people have strayed from the true faith and they are being punished. This answer appears even when it defies logic, such in northwestern Turkey, where the most conservative Muslim communities were the hardest hit in the 1999 earthquake. (Incidentally, the Christians in Turkey tended toward another explanation - that Muslims were being punished for their treatment of Christians).
This is why the Book of Job is in our Bibles. Usually, there is no answer. This is a story that rings true.
In fact, many things in life actually are better explained by stories than by logic. Life is messy and chaotic not orderly and chronological. My Scots-Irish ancestors often quoted Robbie Burns. "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft a' glee. Things happen by whim or chance. One of our ways of bringing order and meaning is to tell stories, of ourselves, and of our families. All families have these stories - Mennonites are not an exception!
In my own family, my maternal grandmother was an identical twin. Her sister booked ocean passage on a ship from Newcastle England to Montreal. However, at the last minute, for reasons that no one in the family knows, she gave the ticket to my grandmother and remained in England. My grandmother came to Canada, married, raised six daughters and a son in Abbey Saskatchewan. Viewed now, it can easily be told as a story of courage, romance and adventure. But was it? Why did my grandmother's sister not take the voyage? Illness? Last minute fear? Awareness of what it was REALLY like in Saskatchewan as opposed to what the recruitment posters were saying?
I write in diaries, a habit inherited from my mother. So lined up on our bookshelves are some thirty years of them. I sit down, usually at the end of the day, and put things in rational order. I am well aware that this is a quite basic element of how I deal with life and make sense of it…putting it in rational form on a page. The diaries area story of my life. My life as I want to see it, and in them, I am the sort of person that I want to be…more or less.
We do not control the future. The question is, does anyone?
Robert Fulford: The Triumph of Narrative (1999 Massey lectures)
How can we deal with the fact that world-shaking events appear to occur at random. Blaise Pascal summed up this infinitely disturbing aspect of history when he wrote, "Cleopatra's nose: if it had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been different". Had Cleopatra not been beautiful and attracted the love of Mark Antony, the history of Rome and Egypt, and therefore the history of civilization, would have developed in another way.
In our own time, the failure of voting machines in Florida allowed the invasion of Iraq, with as-yet-unknown consequences for the Middle East and perhaps the whole world.
In the first Christmas story a very sensible, logical enquiry about a king by the Magi led to the ‘Slaughter of the Innocent'.
However, fact that we cannot change everything does not mean that we can change nothing. In fact, we all know that what we do and the decisions we make can make a difference in one other person's life, or two. Or a dozen? Or a hundred? I remind myself of this frequently.
This Christmas we have moved into a house across the street from Bill and Marlene J. In it are the accumulations of twenty-five years of a family's life, including an 1892 edition of "An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray. I like to think that he also found meaning there, in a cemetery.
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
The boast of Heraldry, the pomp of Pow'r,
- Gray's Elegy -
The Ghostly Idea in ‘A Christmas Carol' is that the future is not fixed. What we do, the decisions we make this year will change the future. Our future and the future of others. When we feel trapped in sorrow, frustration, or regret it is possible for this to be a comfort and encouragement.
This is in fact at the heart of the Christian message of salvation. We can choose to be different, to make the future different. And we can call on the Almighty for the strength to do so.
I am aware that this has not been the most cheerful collection of festive thoughts! And Paul Siebert asked that I end my remarks on a ‘high note'!
Yesterday morning we had Christmas with our assortment of daughters, legally adopted and otherwise! Ghenette, Alba, Kara and Dan. And of course a grandchild racing about shrieking with glee, tearing wrapping from gifts and behaving as children ought on Christmas morning
With that scene in mind, I close with the words of Tiny Tim in ‘A Christmas Carol,' uttered in a very similar Christmas morning context, as an excited little boy would:
"God Bless us, Every One."
Their homely joys and destiny obscure;
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
And all that Beauty, all that Wealth ere gave,
Await, alike, th'inevitable hour;
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.