Helpless Ghosts – Yuletide Musings #1
Dickens A Christmas Carol plays a big role this time of year at our house. This will be the third year that we see the play as a family at the McCarter Theater, and the first year where the kids partially read the book to us rather than us read it to them. It goes without saying that they have seen several of the movie adaptations; from the Muppets and Jim Carry’s cartoons to the classic with Alastair Sim as Scrooge. Is it a little scary? You bet. Who didn’t get slightly freaked out when Christmas Present lifts his robe to show Ignorance and Want. Sometimes a scare can do a lot of good.
The part that scared me most as a kid, the part that I think should scare us all the most, is not a vision of Christmas Past, Present, or Future or even the warnings of Jacob Marley. Its a scene that usually doesn’t make it into the film. It’s when Marley leaves Scrooge and Scrooge looks out the window to see hundreds and hundreds of spirits living in agony. But here’s the catch: their agony and their torture is not regret at what they did or did not do in life. It is agony about their inability to render service to those in need after a life squandered on self interest…
“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 (they might be guilty governments) 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 door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.” – Charles Dickens
As Sorcerers, Witches, Magicians etc we often place spirits and shades on a high pedestal, placing value on the powers of influence that they possess which we don’t. But we are also spirits. Spirits who are lucky enough to possess bodies. As practitioners of magic, we have a foot in both worlds: we can set the machinations of spirits in motion to solve a problem, but we can also be the agents of those spirits, interfering for goo in human matters in a way that spirits cannot.
To discover the real meaning of Christmas, a holiday that in its current form probably owes more to Dickens to to any Pagan or Christian tradition, it is a worthwhile exercise to Scrooge yourself. Tony Robbins has a great exercise built around this that you can listen to here. But all you really need to do is stay up one night and starting at midnight spend time looking at key moments of your past for an hour. A Full Hour. Don’t just think about it, remember it, relive it, and contemplate it. Use the WHOLE HOUR. Then look at your present for an hour and all the people that you effect and intersect with. Then for the last hour imagine what life looks like 10 years from now if you don’t change anything from how you are now. Follow this into the future. Be honest and be brutal. Then imagine that the Dickensian afterlife is real: Do you move on with a clear conscience knowing you used your human existence to do something worthwhile, or are you the helpless ghost whose misery is that they can no longer intercede in human affairs after a wasted life of self-interest?
Don’t be afraid to scare the shit out of yourself. That is what a good ghost story is for.