Greetings and blessings to you and yours this Christmastide. Wherever you are when you celebrate the Prince of Peace, whomever you are with, may it be a harbinger of a joyful new year in a world that, more than ever, needs your witness of Christ’s joy, justice, peace, and love.Outside the Bible, few expressions of joy are more evocative than Charles Dickens’ character Scrooge’s Christmas epiphany. The text discloses, though most movie version do not, that he went to church. Then he “walked about the streets, and watched people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure.”
So Scrooge grappled with his ghosts, heard the gospel of Jesus Christ, and went forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit. Note that all Scrooge’s rejoicing is in people. No one feels that way all the time, including great writers, who enclose a universe of happiness and sorrow, as we all do. Dickens plumbed his happiest relationships and imagined a soul taking pleasure from everyone he met while manifesting curiosity about their lives, especially unhoused people, those laboring in basements, and those partying upstairs.
Dickens had known enough transcendent joy to imagine our doing our best to be the golden rule incarnate, loving others as ourselves, across every barrier of difference and distinction. “May that be truly said of us,” as Dickens writes at the end, “and all of us!”
(Members of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles received this letter by email this morning in English and Spanish. If you would like to be on the mailing list, add your email here. The photo, from the 1951 film “A Christmas Carol,” shows Alastair Sim’s Scrooge noticing Kathleen Harrison’s Mrs. Dilber on Christmas morning.)