Scrooge Sees the Light

This year, we’ve seen extraordinary acts of generosity as people battle the dark of the pandemic with the laser light of giving. For many, doing for others is second nature, for others, the joy of contributing is a lesson learned – sometimes later in life.  In this regard, it’s hard to beat the electrifying conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge, the monumental character created by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol. Scrooge begins the tale as an “odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man.” By the time the story wraps up, he is “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town or borough, in the good old world.” 

In The Well-Lived Life, I wrote about Scrooge’s reformation. A significant stimulus was provided by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come when he let Scrooge preview his own death. Scrooge views his corpse on his deathbed “plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for.” He mourns his fate. He also recognizes his role in the death foretold of dear Tiny Tim, the crippled son of his badly treated employee. When Scrooge is given the chance to change his legacy, he seizes it. 

We focus on this late-in-life rehabilitation, particularly at this time of year, but this was actually Scrooge’s second major life transformation. His first was changing from a young man with fine ambitions who had earned the hand of a loving young woman, to the covetous, hard-hearted Scrooge. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge the moment when his fiancée called off their engagement because the idol of greed had displaced her in Scrooge’s heart. “I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you . . . You arechanged,” she says. 

A Christmas Carol was first published in 1843, but its theme is completely contemporary. Recently, a young woman we’ll call Sarah, who could be a stand-in for Scrooge’s good-hearted fiancée, played out an eerily similar scenario with her boyfriend of several years. They were living together and everyone assumed they would marry. But Sarah found that her boyfriend was spending more and more time on his business ventures and less and less time with her. “Whenever one of his commercial projects wrapped up,” Sarah says, “I hoped our life would rebalance. But then another corporate priority would reclaim first place in his life.” Sarah loved her boyfriend but wanted something more, for both of them. When she confronted her Scrooge, he, like his fictional counterpart, did not disagree with her assessment. He claimed that his priority, for now, had to be his career. He walked away from the relationship and gave Sarah up. With this decision, they are both writing their legacies on different trajectories. 

Thanks to the enforced isolation of the pandemic, we’ve had a chance to take a good look at ourselves, our relationships, and our priorities. Our job now is to stay the course of our nobler selves, even after we’ve been vaccinated.