Andrew Klavan celebrates A Christmas Carol as Dickens’ masterpiece, comparing its storytelling to Shakespeare’s while dismissing academic snobbery toward its joyful themes. Scrooge’s redemption hinges on confronting ghosts—Past reveals his past sins (abandoning love for wealth), Present contrasts Cratchit’s chaotic but joyful family with his loneliness, and Yet-to-Come forces him to see eternity’s spiritual value over materialism. Klavan argues modern feminism’s rejection of motherhood’s "yin" values mirrors Scrooge’s error, while Christian joy, rooted in undeserved grace, transforms individuals like Scrooge, proving personal change—not societal reform—holds timeless meaning. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is the Andrew Klavan Christmas Special.
I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday and a wonderful Christmas season and a blessed Christmas season.
I hope that the season, the spirit of the season is coming through you and into you and all the people that you're with and all the people that you love.
And I just wanted to talk today a little bit about what I think, what I hope is a fresh look at the greatest Christmas story that isn't in the Bible.
In fact, when it was published, it was hailed by some as the fifth gospel, which is a little hyperbole, but still, it has some truth to it.
And that's Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
And they're going to be full spoilers, but I assume you all know the story.
In my estimation, A Christmas Carol is one of the greatest works of English literature, which is among the greatest literatures in the world, if not the greatest English literature.
And it is a book by one of English literature's greatest authors.
Leo Tolstoy, who is himself obviously a great author, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karena, is said to have remarked that Dickens was the only writer who could be compared to Shakespeare.
And I think that there is some truth to that.
There is something about Dickens that is essential, something about him that just captures the world in a special way.
The intellectual class tends to dismiss him because he is joyful and loves humanity and is full of life and entertainment and humor.
And of course, the intellectual class thinks that darkness is deeper than light, which is simply not true.
But the fact is, just when it comes to pure talent, he had the storytelling power of the greatest bestseller.
I mean, guys who I think are great storytellers, like Stephen King is a great storyteller.
But Dickens had that power paired with the prose of an angel.
His prose is as beautiful as there is in English.
If you read just the opening two pages of Bleak House, you'll see what I mean.
And his characters are unbelievably vivid.
They are larger than life, and yet they also speak of life.
You know who they are.
You know what a Scrooge is, for instance.
You know who these people are.
You can say when you meet them, oh, he's like a character out of Dickens.
And of all his works, although I think he's written so many great, great novels, I can't think of a single piece of writing of his or maybe of anybody else's outside of, again, outside of the Bible, that bears a purer, more unadulterated mark of inspiration than a Christmas Carol.
You know, a writer's main job is getting out of the way of his own inspiration, getting his likes and his personal likes and his personal scars and his personal obsessions, getting all of that out of the way and letting inspiration pass through him as cleanly as it can.
Now, it's going to carry stuff that's inside him out into the world.
That's what makes his work unique.
But still, that inspiration is coming.
It's not coming from within him.
It's coming through him.
Any good writer will tell you this, even if he's embarrassed to say it.
And his job is to get out of the way.
And I think somehow in A Christmas Carol, Dickens did that better than any other book, any other author at any other time I can think about.
He wrote the book in the 1840s when he was in financial difficulty.
You know, he'd come on the scene with the Pickwick papers, and it was just a smash.
And he was a huge, huge celebrity, maybe the biggest celebrity in England of his time.
But that time, those first stories like Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, they had sort of faded away.
And his latest novel, which was called Martin Chuzzlewit, had not done well.
And he was hurting for money.
And he wrote this book, A Christmas Carol, and he said at one point, I'm going to have to depend on this book making money because I'm in trouble here.
And his publisher got it and wasn't very impressed with it and said, well, we'll bring it out in a cheap edition, which would be nowadays like bringing out a paperback original, bringing out your book instead of bringing it out in a nice hardcover, would be bringing it out as a paperback original, which in the old days meant it was cheap.
And nowadays it's all a little bit more confused, but still, that's what it would be like.
And so Dickens said, no, I'm not going to do that.
He said, I will pay the cost of printing a good edition.
And because he paid for it, he then had power over it.
And he produced a very beautiful edition with the famous John Leach drawings, which you've probably seen.
If you saw them, you would recognize them.
And also he got a deal where he got to collect most of the profits himself.
Usually the publisher takes most of the profits and you get a royalty, which is, you know, maybe if you're lucky, between 10 and 25%.
But he took the lion's share of the profits because he did it.
And I'm sure he was glad he did because on publication, the book was greeted with ecstasy.
Immediately, the immediate it hit the stands, people went crazy.
People said that even old crusty guys like William Makepeace Thackeray, I think it was, who wrote Vanity Fair, who didn't believe in Christmas, even they said they started inviting people over to their house for parties and suddenly they felt more open-hearted and more generous and more in the Christmas spirit.
It had that powerful an impact when it was published and of course it has been powerful ever since.
It gave us Ebenezer Scrooge.
If you call a man a Scrooge, everybody knows you mean a miser.
It popularized the wonderful term Bahumbug, which is what I say mostly through Christmas.
And some people even say, and I don't know if this is true, but Charles Dickens had a difficult childhood after about the age of 12.
His father, if you've ever read David Copperfield, is a character of Mr. Macauber, who just is always in debt and always spending more money than he has and is always getting into trouble.
And even though he's very lovable, he's just getting himself into trouble.
And in fact, Dickens described his early years as idyllic.
He said he had a wonderful, wonderful childhood, but then his father got so badly into debt that he was taken to prison.
He was put in debtor's prison.
And Dickens, Charles Dickens at like 11, 12 years old, was sent to work in a factory.
And this was a very scarring, you know, formative experience that he had.
And people say that in his early days during that idyllic period, it often snowed at Christmas in England, which is not very common.
And for eight years, apparently in a row, it snowed in Christmas.
So Dickens started to write snow into Christmas.
And we've been wishing, dreaming of a white Christmas ever since.
And a lot of the sort of sense of what Christmas is, a lot of the traditions of what Christmas is, the look of what Christmas is come from Charles Dickens.
There's a movie about him called The Man Who Invented Christmas.
Wishing for Snow00:11:30
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And the novella, it's a very short novel.
I don't know how much it is, depends on the print, but it's a very short novel.
And it was kind of a bridge, that inspiration that went through him was kind of a bridge between those early successes that he had that made him a star, and then the later great novels, which are like, you know, David Copperfield and Bleak House and Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, which are novels that are the best novels of the novel at the peak of its time.
There's nothing like them if you've never read them.
They are just an absolute joy.
David Copperfield, one of the greatest books ever written, just so entertaining and yet so rich with characters.
The characters just become part of your life.
So since that time, the Christmas Carol obviously has been filmed and staged and satirized and reimagined more times than anyone can count.
There are some upwards of 100 remakes of it as a movie or as a TV show or as something that inspired.
Even the only other truly great Christmas movie, in my opinion, which is It's a Wonderful Life, is simply a Christmas Carol in reflection.
It's a mirror image of a Christmas Carol.
A Christmas Carol, a greedy man supernaturally examines his life and sees that it was horrible in It's a Wonderful Life.
A generous man supernaturally sees what the world would be like without his life and realizes that it's a wonderful life.
And so it's basically the same story, just in mirror images.
And in both of them, both those stories, and importantly, and we'll get back to this a little bit later on, both books are just about a change of outlook.
You know, nothing happens, nothing changes in the world.
It was what Jesus Christ called metanoia, a change of mind.
And when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change, as the saying goes.
So the book is, though it's small, it's too big to cover with the depth that it deserves.
We'd be here for weeks.
But I just want to take a look at certain aspects of it that I think are particularly relevant to this chaotic and transitional moment in the history of the West when people are wondering, you know, being, how can I say it, being tempted by false philosophies, by where people are looking for a place to stand, they're looking for thought leadership, who will step forward with an honest philosophy, an honest outlook that they can believe in.
It's not just honest and cruel or honest and stupid, but is honest and true and true to what God wants from us.
And I think that I want to try and show why the book gets at the heart of the gospel message and why it has been so effective to people over these years and it still is.
And it's just an incredible, powerful story.
So let me just read the beginning paragraph, which, you know, those of you who know the book will know it, but it begins with a very strange beginning.
It begins, Marley was dead to begin with.
Those are the first lines, that's the first sentence in the book.
Marley was dead to begin with.
There is no doubt whatever about that.
The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.
Scrooge signed it, and Scrooge's name was good upon change for anything he chose to put his hand to.
Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.
And about a paragraph down, Dickens adds, this must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I'm going to relate.
It's a strange place to start.
You might think you would start with a happy Christmas scene to set the seasonal tone and then focus down on this one grumbling miser.
But no, he starts with death.
And this story is built so that it begins with death and it ends with death.
It ends with Scrooge's death when he goes into the future and sees himself as a dead man.
And then there's a brief epilogue of redemption and coming back to life and joy.
So death is the foundational fact of the story.
And that's true of the Gospels too in a lot of ways.
The curse of death is on the world.
And the story of redemption through Jesus Christ ends with Christ's death.
And then there's a brief epilogue where death is overturned with redemption and joy.
So it's kind of built along the same lines.
But death is really important.
And the fact that you have to believe that Marley is dead, you have to understand it, or nothing wonderful can happen, is very important.
So we're introduced to Scrooge, and Dickens describes him in his wonderful, exuberant and generous prose.
Generosity, to me, is maybe the key factor in art.
If you have generosity, that will increase your talent.
I can think of probably a very generous living author, J.K. Rowling.
If you read her books, she just pours all her inventiveness into each book.
She doesn't say, I'm going to hold this out to book three.
She just pours it all in there, and every line is a new invention, a new supernatural trick that she's dreamed of.
And then the next book, she just trusts herself to be able to do it again.
It's generous writing, and it just brings you up short.
And here is Dickens describing Scrooge.
He says, oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner, hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire.
It doesn't leave a lot of room.
You get the picture, not a nice guy.
And we see this dramatized in a scene very early on where some people come trying to raise funds for the poor.
And I'm going to illustrate some of these scenes with scenes from the great 1951 film version, which is the best version ever filmed of it by far.
And one of the reasons it's the best ever filmed by far is the script, which is written by the guy who co-wrote The Wizard of Oz, Noel Langley.
It is very close to the book.
And so I've only used scenes where it doesn't diverge much from what is in the book.
And this is the scene where they come to Scrooge's office looking to raise some money for the poor.
This is cut one.
At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute.
Father, no prisons.
Plenty of prisons.
And the union workhouses, are they still in operation?
They are.
I wish I could say they were not.
And the treadmill and the poor law, they're still in full vigor, I presume.
Both very busy, sir.
Oh, from what you said at first, I was afraid that something had happened to stop them in their useful course.
I'm very glad to hear it.
I don't think you quite understand us, sir.
A few of us are endeavoring to raise a fund to buy the poor some meat and drink and means of warmth.
Why?
Because it is at Christmas time that want is most keenly felt and abundance rejoices.
What can I put you down for?
Nothing.
You wish to be anonymous.
I wish to be left alone.
Since you asked me what I wish, sir, that is my answer.
I hope to support the establishments I have mentioned.
Those who are badly off must go there.
Many can't go there, and some would rather die.
If they would rather die, they'd better do it and decrease the surplus population.
What I love about this Alastair Sim, one of the great actors of British film.
And what I love about his performance is he plays Scrooge as a man sure of himself.
He's happy to debate this guy.
He's going to win this debate every time.
And I've had people say to me, you know, he makes a lot of good arguments.
As a conservative, I have to mention, I just want to point out that he uses the fact that government provides for the poor as an excuse not to give anybody any money.
And that is in keeping with the fact that conservatives tend to be about 50% more charitable than leftists who feel just the fact that they support government largesse, whether it works or not, makes them good people.
And I think that that is a really important thing about entitlements.
It takes the weight of charity off people.
And charity is better for the poor than entitlements.
To tell somebody you're entitled to someone else's money is actually to destroy him in many different ways.
Whereas to say, I have given you charity, now you owe me gratitude in a different life, I think is more important.
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Faith and Fear00:14:41
But I have to add, just to be fair, that that line where he says, if they want to die instead of, you know, go on welfare, they better do it and decrease the surplus population.
That sounds like conservative.
It sounds like Matt Walsh.
I could see Matt Walsh saying, if they would rather die, let them do it and decrease the surplus population.
And conservatives often forget that hard-boiled honesty that doesn't go hand in hand with humanity and decency is not that great an idea.
Later, when Scrooge sees a tiny Tim and realizes that he will die because of poverty, he begs the spirit of Christmas present not to let that happen.
And the spirit says, well, if you'd rather die, let him decrease the surplus population.
And then he says, forbear that wicked cant.
Kant is kind of rhetoric that sounds important, but actually is meaningless.
He says, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered what the surplus is and where it is.
In other words, stop with the rhetoric and remember the humanity.
And both left and right, I think, should do well to remember that actually this is all about people.
And if your programs, your government programs don't work and make things worse for people, then you're not a good person.
And even if you say things that may have some truth to them, if you don't care about the people, I mean, if you just pretend, you know, just showing off your virtue, but not taking care of the people, that is no good.
You know, that's not where we're trying to get.
And don't worry about Matt Walsh.
My ghost will visit him on Christmas Eve and I will visit him with – it's probably going to take about 15 spirits to redeem him, but we'll try.
So, all right, so Scrooge goes home and he's confronted with the only ghost.
There's only one ghost in the story, and that's Marley.
All the rest of the Christmas spirits are spirits, but Marley is a dead man who is Scrooge's partner and was just as miserly a man as he was.
And now he appears as a ghost and he is in purgatory wearing chains.
And as he says in the book, he is doomed to wander through the world and witness what he cannot share but might have shared on earth and turned to happiness.
And this, he says, is an incessant torture of remorse.
Now, there are some scenes in literature that stand alone as being brilliant, incisive, and essential in their description of human nature.
I've often talked on the show about the mad scene in Hamlet, which I believe is a scene about what Shakespeare thinks will happen when faith goes out of the world, which he is predicting will happen in Hamlet.
That is my take on the play.
And Hamlet pretends to be mad.
And what does he say when he pretends to be mad?
He says, nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
So he's a moral relativist.
You know, you might say a multiculturalist.
Your culture is as good as mine.
And yes, you enslave women, but you're brown, so that's fine.
Everything's fine.
You know, he has moral relativism.
When he's asked what he's reading, he says words, words, words.
So that's postmodernism, where words cease to have any real meaning.
And you can say, oh, yes, I'm a woman because I feel like a woman because the words don't describe anything except what we want them to describe.
And he talks about how facts become indistinguishable from feelings, as Shapiro might say, because he says, if my mood changes, the entire nature of the world changes.
So those are all the diseases that will come when faith goes out of the world.
And sure enough, 400 years later, that is exactly what has happened.
Well, I count the Scrooge and Marley confrontation as a scene at that level.
I think it is incredibly incisive about what the problem is when you confront your godlessness.
So Marley is played by one of the great British actors, Michael Hordern, and he confronts Scrooge.
If you're listening to this and not watching, he's transparent.
He's wearing chains.
His jaw drops because he's a dead man when he takes the cloth off his mouth.
And this is the confrontation between Scrooge and the ghost of Jacob Marley.
I don't.
Why do you doubt your sense?
Because a little thing affects them.
A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheat.
You, you might be an undigested beef.
A piece of cheese.
A fragment of an underdone potato.
There's more of gravy than of grave in you.
Whatever you are.
You see that beef pick?
I do.
I'm not looking at it.
But I see it notwithstanding.
Well then, I've just got to swallow this.
I've been tortured for the rest of my life by a legion of hobgoblins.
All of my own creation.
It's all humbug, I tell you.
Man of the worldly mind, do you or not?
Yes, I do, I do, I do, I do.
I must.
So that scene is a work of genius.
He's sitting there.
Obviously, a miser is a materialist by definition.
He puts the value of material higher than any spiritual value.
In fact, he doesn't really believe in spiritual values at all.
He just wants that money, money, money.
And, you know, a materialist always has a reason not to believe.
Here he's sitting there.
He's talking to a transparent man in chains who floats through the room, walks through doors, and he says, I don't believe in you because, well, why?
Because he might be a hallucination.
I mean, how many times have you spoken to people who say, you know, you'll say to them, oh, you know, they'll say, I've experienced God.
I know a woman who died, left her body, and she was a socialist, so she was a total materialist, died, left her body.
And I said to her, well, has that changed your point of view?
No, not at all.
So there's always, you know, as people have said, I think I've said, if you have faith, you don't need proof.
And if you don't have faith, no proof will ever be enough.
And so Marley doesn't argue with him because he knows you can't argue, so you can't convince somebody like that.
He just lets out a shriek, a terrifying shriek.
And this is in the book as well.
That's why I use the movie scene.
And he says, man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me or not?
I mean, we could say this to the entire population of the United States of America.
Man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me or not?
And he says, I do.
I must.
Why?
Because he's scared.
And fear is a passage to faith.
You know, the other day, my friend John Miller, who runs the journalism department at Hillsdale, asked me to visit his class on Zoom.
He's doing a class on the ghost story.
And he asked me a question, why is the ghost story associated with Christmas?
And I quoted this scene, and I said, the ghost story is by nature about the hidden spiritual reality becoming visible, which is eerie and unnerving.
And it's like sitting in the dark and suddenly you hear somebody moving around, but you don't know who's there.
It's frightening.
And fear is a passage to faith because when you are afraid of something that you can't see, you're admitting that it's there.
I was once fishing and I lost, I was fishing in a gorge and I lost track of time.
And if darkness fell, and that's dangerous for me because I have literally no sense of direction and I have to be very careful when I'm in the woods, especially at night.
So I started hiking home and I was a little anxious, but I knew if I climbed, since I was in a gorge, I would get out.
And the full moon rose and I found myself worrying about werewolves.
Seriously, I thought like, oh my God, it's a full moon and I'm in the dark.
And I thought, wait a minute, what am I talking about?
There are no werewolves.
Fear will lead you to believe in things that you don't believe in.
And the fear of God, as Proverbs tell us, is the beginning of wisdom.
The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom because God is there.
So you're fearing something you can't see.
That makes you believe in it.
And it's there.
So it pays off in wisdom.
And that's, you know, that means that the Christmas Carol is, in a sense, a ghost story about ghost stories, about why ghost stories matter.
So at the beginning of the story, we're told that nothing wonderful can happen unless we know that Marley is dead.
We have to believe that Marley is dead.
And now we see why we have to believe that because it wouldn't be wonderful if he just walked in the door and said, shape up, Scrooge.
He's got to be a ghost to prove his point.
And he's got to be a ghost also embedded in a system of justice that extends beyond life.
You know, people accuse Christians of believing in the afterlife, saying, oh, you're afraid of death.
Well, you know, everybody's afraid of death.
And I don't think that goes away if you're a Christian.
But that's not why you believe in the afterlife.
You deduce it from experience.
You notice that if people live a certain way and deprive themselves of immediate gratification, they live a happier, richer, deeper life.
And that makes you think, well, if you know, the thing about physical gratification is it's instantaneous.
The thing about spiritual gratification is it happens over time.
You know, go out and sleep with a stranger, and that's fun right away.
You know, sleep with a woman over time.
And suddenly you think, oh, wait, this is actually a richer, deeper experience than I was expecting to have.
You know, so that is the funny thing about it.
And what you're saying is, since the rich sometimes thrive, since they sometimes die on top of the heap, and the poor sometimes, and life is unfair, the fact that we react with joy to a longer-lasting deprivation that actually fills our spirits indicates that there is a justice that goes beyond life, that life is larger than life.
And that is why we believe, and that's why it's so important for Scrooge to believe, man of the worldly mind.
Do you believe in me or not?
Or do you believe that the guy who dies with the most toys wins?
That's the alternative.
The alternative is the richest guy wins.
The guy who gets the most babes, the guy who gets, you know, is the most famous wins.
And we know that's not true because look how many famous rich people die in the gutter of drug overdoses and are hooked on drugs or abused or whatever.
We know that that is not the path to joy, the joy that Christ promises and actually delivers.
So this is why Marley asks that central question, you know, and it's the key question as far as I'm concerned for any life.
So now he says, three spirits will visit you.
And so let's go through the spirits.
We'll begin, obviously, with the ghost of Christmas past.
He's the first spirit who comes in.
And Marley says, these ghosts are going to visit you for your redemption.
And Scrooge is like, I'd really just rather get a good night's sleep.
But he's awakened by the ghost of Christmas Past.
And it's a wonderful description of the book of his being old and young at once.
He's as old as time, and yet he's as young as this person was.
Because when Scrooge says, Are you the ghost of Christmas long past?
He says, no, you're past.
So he's young because Scrooge was young in the past.
The book describes him in part like this.
He says, from the crown of its head, there sprung a bright, clear jet of light by which all was visible, and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.
And later, Scrooge will find the past so painful that he tries to pull this extinguisher down and put the fire out.
And so this is foreseeing the Freudian idea that when you repress the past, we don't want to face our past, we don't want to face the pain of our past, but when we repress it, the past gets more power over us.
So when you go back and you examine your past and you look at your past, you become free from its secret power.
And you can sometimes say, oh, I'm doing this because my brother beat me up.
You know, I'm doing this because my father was mean to me.
I'm going out with an abusive man.
Women do this a lot because my father was abusive.
And if you get that, can face that past, you can free yourself of those habits and have full choice.
And that's what this ghost is doing.
The spirit is giving him psychology.
He's basically giving him a look at his own past.
And we don't learn that much about it.
We learn that he was abandoned and left alone at school.
And I'm sure this is part of Dickens' life, that he was entertained.
His only company with the company of stories and famous books that he loved, the Arabian Nights and so on.
And we learn that he's angry at his nephew, who was always trying to get him to come over and engage in Christmas because his beloved sister died giving birth to his nephew.
And that's why he's angry at him.
But he doesn't, but Scrooge is not so foolish as to use psychology to explain why Scrooge loves money.
Dickens is not so foolish as to believe that psychology is needed to explain why Scrooge loves money any more than we have to explain why men love sex or any kind of pleasure or alcohol.
It's inherent in our fleshly desires that we love money, that we love comfort, that we love drugs.
All these things are inherent in what we are.
It's human nature to like the material pleasures and be uncontrolled.
Every desire has a will of its own.
And while we want our desire to point to the woman we love, it goes off and runs off after anything that moves.
So there's a lot of stuff in the past, but I just want to focus on this one important scene.
It shows us Scrooge has now become a miser, and he's lost the girl he once loved and was engaged to because he's become a miser.
And it's very good, a very good scene in the movie, but it's virtually the same as the scene in the book.
This is cut three.
Then you no longer love me.
You no longer love me.
When have I ever said that?
In words, never.
Well, what then?
In the way you have changed.
But how have I changed towards you?
By changing towards the world.
Is it such a terrible thing for a man to struggle with something better than he is?
Another idol has replaced me in your heart.
A golden idol.
It's singular, the world that can be so brutally cruel to the poor professes to condemn the pursuit of wealth in the same breath.
You fear the world too much.
With reason.
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So she says that line, which is really a wonderful line and is in the book, another idol has replaced me in your heart.
Now think about that for a minute.
Here is a woman who is engaged to this man and she's a poor girl, but she thinks of herself as his idol.
Now, a modern woman, I don't think, would ever say that or think to be that because feminists have told her that that's bad.
Idol Replaced In Heart00:03:04
He's being put on a pedestal.
And there's a reason for that.
It's because feminists are idiots and they make everybody miserable and everybody they touch is miserable.
For a woman to be an idol to a man is a really important factor in a happy marriage.
You know, we have all this stuff about, oh, women, we say, you know, the men have to be strong and control them.
But, you know, also you have to elevate the woman in your life.
I mean, that is a position of, for a woman to be your wife, for a man, is a position of great honor and, you know, and nobility and power because you care that this woman is, whether this woman is happy or not.
Now, there's different kinds of idols.
See, money is an idol because it represents something that it is not.
It's like a statue of a god.
If you mistake a statue for the god and think the statue has power over you, you are an idolater, okay?
But what does it mean for a woman to be an idol, for your wife or mother to be an idol?
So before the spirit leaves, before the spirit of Christmas present leaves, of Christmas past, I'm sorry, leaves, he takes Scrooge to see what has happened to his fiancée.
And in fact, she's now a married woman with a house full of children and a loving husband who kind of laughs at Scrooge because he's so miserable and alone.
And she's got a daughter who is now the spitting image of what she was as a young woman, right?
Her daughter is now a grown woman and she's very, very beautiful and looks like the fiancée that Scrooge lost.
And Dickens describes the chaos of a house full of children.
And nobody was better than Dickens than describing the happiness of chaos and joy with all its troubles.
Like he'll have kids swallowing things and, you know, falling off, having their heads bump into things and falling off furniture.
But he describes it with so much joy that it actually brings the joy out of it.
And let me just describe this room full of children who are the children of the woman he was going to marry before he became a miser.
The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children there than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count.
And unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not 40 children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like 40.
The consequences were uproarious beyond belief, but no one seemed to care.
On the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily and enjoyed it very much, and the latter, soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands almost ruthlessly.
So the daughter is now swept away into the chaos of the children.
And here is one of the weirdest passages in A Christmas Carol.
Dickens looks on as these children surround their younger sister, their older sister, and they love her and they're pulling at her and they're touching her and they're stroking her.
And he looks on and he envies them their ability to lay hands on this beautiful young girl.
Children's Chaos00:07:20
He says, I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips, to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes and never raised a blush, to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price.
In short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest license of a child and yet to have been man enough to know its value.
In other words, she's a turn-on, and he wishes that he's watching these children touch her and play with her and fondle her, and he wishes he could touch her and play with her and fondle her as a man and not as a child.
Now, you might think, ooh, that's creepy, but I'm going to argue that it's not creepy at all, and that if you think it's creepy, it's because your minds have been poisoned by modern psychology.
Dickens is saying something urgent here.
He is saying that the sexual urge and the creative chaos of the family are linked.
In fact, they are all one thing.
The idol that gold replaced was the idol of creative love, which is no idol, really.
It's an instantiation of the true image of God.
The mother, as a creator, as someone who brings life into the world, who nurtures life, who gives it its independence, who impresses her image on it, is an instantiation of the creative power of God.
And how many times has that lovely Andrew Cliff told you that women as mothers represent a sacred set of values of self-sacrifice and generosity and love before anything?
And without that set of mother values, the world sinks into a chaos of mere desire.
Desire powers the world, and desire is the province of men.
When I say that, I'm talking about ambition, and I'm not just talking about sexual desire, I'm talking about all the desires to build and to take hold of things and to acquire.
Those things are largely associated with men.
It's not that women, you know, men and women are not utterly different.
It's not that they don't share these things, but to build buildings and businesses and works of art has traditionally been the work of men, and it brings about the future.
But the stillness and surrender and generosity of motherhood that takes a mother out of that world, which is a sacrifice of a certain kind of life, that is what makes the future worthwhile.
If it were only the values of men that governed the world, the world would be an awful place.
And that is, to me, what feminism is all about.
It's saying that only the values of men, only success, only power, only gold and only building things is worthwhile.
And motherhood, which, or as now, as the feminists refer to it, is just motherhood.
It's only motherhood.
Motherhood, with its incredible other set of values, its yin set of values, as opposed to the yang set of values of manhood, is basically derided and made small.
And I think that that has been one of the greatest curses on our world.
Thank you to the feminists.
You know, only Christianity gives the honor to motherhood through Mary.
And I think this is why Christ was born of a virgin, because it says that there is something separate and a part of motherhood, separate from desire and motherhood, that is simply creative love.
And there's a tension between male values and women's values.
That's why men are afraid of women.
That's why men dress women up in burqas and why they tell them to stay out of the way, because they're afraid that their ambitions and desires will be hampered and compromised by the values of motherhood.
And they will.
They'll also be enhanced.
They'll also be made better.
They'll also be made worthwhile.
But there are going to be times when a father has to be a father and not the constantly working person that he is.
I mean, the minute my children left, I went back to being the workaholic I am.
But there was, you lose time in the workplace because of children.
And, you know, I just think that the discounting of mothers and motherhood and of the creative force of women is one of the greatest flaws in our world.
And I think that is what Dickens is showing me.
And one of the reasons I'm such a fan of traditional marriage and at-home mothers is because I think they bring these yin-yang values into proper balance through love, which I think obviously is the tent of a God of love.
So again, to say a woman is an idol is different than saying money is an idol because she doesn't just represent the creative force of God.
She instantiates it in the world.
She has an actual living presence of creation in the world.
And to hold her as your idol is actually a passage into God.
I mean, if I hadn't found the love of my life in my wife, I don't think I ever would have become a Christian.
It was knowing that love was real, seeing that love was real, seeing that love was creative, you know, that actually confirmed in me that my feelings about God were right.
And by the way, if my wife is listening and she thinks I'm going to come home and be nice to her, forget it.
I'm going to continue to be the evil tyrant that I am.
All right.
Now, all I want to say about the next ghost, let's move on to the next ghost, the ghost of Christmas Present.
All I want to say about the ghost of Christmas Present is that he elevates the simple lives of the poor.
He takes Scrooge on a tour of various poor places, including Bob Cratchit, his clerk's home where Tiny Tim is, and where everybody is simple, everybody's poor.
And in all of these scenes, the chaos of love is elevated above money.
It's busy.
It's too busy.
It's crazy.
Everything is out of control.
That children in Bob Cratchit's household are running all over the place and playing games and teasing each other.
The dancing and games and flirtation at Scrooge's nephew's house are just, you know, the laughter is just laughter.
People are laughing just to laugh.
And it is a party and the singing of miners and sailors and people in difficult situations.
No one writes this stuff better than Dickens.
No one can make you smile as you're reading about a chaotic family and their troubles, even their troubles, like Charles Dickens can.
And you might say, well, this is kind of fake.
It's idealistic.
It's false.
Showing that, you know, the chaos of family life can be annoying and exhausting.
And when a child bangs his head against the door, it's not funny.
He hurts his head.
That's a terrible thing.
And Dickens makes it funny.
And parties are sometimes full of nastiness and drunkenness and envy and all these things.
And a dance might be full of drugs and bad behavior and all this stuff.
And because of this, a lot of people, especially intellectual critics, say that Dickens is false.
But what I think he's saying is open your eyes.
Open your eyes, change your mind and see that all your joy is tied up in this chaos of relationship.
That all of your joy comes from love.
And the most important love you will experience here on earth is the love of one another.
And when you are at a party and when people are laughing and when your children are running around and screaming and driving you crazy, that is the moment of greatest life and greatest joy.
So there's a scene of this in the Christmas Past scene where Scrooge attends an office Christmas party.
He goes back and pass to attend an office Christmas party given by his beloved boss, Fezziwig.
And here is that scene from the film, which is cut four.
Look, there's old Fezzerwick and Mrs. Fezzerwick.
Top couple.
Nor was there ever a kinder man.
And yet, what does this party cost him in your mortal money?
Connected to God00:03:30
Three or four pounds at most.
Is that so much that he deserves your praise?
Ooh, but it's not that.
The happiness he gave to us, his clerks and apprentices and everybody who knew him, was as great as if it had cost a fortune.
And so Scrooge suddenly realizes that the worth of money is nothing unless it is related to joy.
I mean, if you've ever seen the best example of this, you've ever seen a child with a toy, like a little girl with a plastic tiara, a little boy with a little transformer toy or whatever this is, and they're just like their eyes are alight with joy to have, you know, the girl has this beautiful tiara and the boy has this cool transformer.
And we're all charmed by that.
At the same time, we're sort of thinking, gee, this thing is essentially worthless.
It didn't cost very much.
It's just a piece of plastic.
It's not, you know, it's not real, not real diamonds, which are really worthwhile because for no reason.
But the child sees its value, in fact, because it's connected to his imagination in which there is a world of beauty and heroism and excitement and love.
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And I think God must see us this way, running after the things that we run after, the diamonds and the sacks and the money and the fame, all the things that we run after and envy and want so very badly.
Those things that make our eyes light up are absolutely worthless unless they are somehow connected to God.
If you are intended to be in a profession that makes you famous, you know, there's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with it.
But if it's the fame alone that you hunt for, and we know people who do this, many of them, or if you're so afraid to lose that fame that you start to be afraid to speak the truth, or you start to be afraid to do what's right because people won't like it, then you have lost your way.
You're no longer connecting that to that world of beauty and heroism and love that was only in God.
You know, Jesus was not born in poverty to sanctify poverty.
There's nothing sacred about poverty.
Jesus was born in poverty to show that wherever he is, that's where the value is.
Eternity's Perspective00:11:21
That's the only place that the value is.
If he is in the throne room, then the value is in the throne room.
If he's in a manger, it's in the manger.
The thing about the poverty and the wealth don't mean anything unless they are connected to God.
That is where the value is.
And so, you know, without him, you know, kings and peasants are equally poor.
And that is essentially what Scrooge is learning as he sees people enjoying their lives, even though they're poor.
Now, the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, he's the one who looks like death.
He looks like he's wearing a black hood, and the only thing that comes out is one hand, one white hand, and he takes Scrooge to various places where Scrooge gets to see that he's dead, but not only is dead, but nobody loves him, and everybody's glad he's dead, and nobody cares a whit about him.
And he shows Scrooge that he dies friendless and alone.
And that has always kind of puzzled me because every man dies alone eventually, and nobody has a good death.
There's no such thing as a good death.
It's a bad thing.
And surely Scrooge knows this, you would think.
So why is he so shocked?
And yes, Scrooge is terrified.
And here is the scene where he approaches his own grave at the beckoning of the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come from this film.
And this is clip five.
Before I draw nearer to that stone, answer me one question.
Are these the shadows of things that must be?
All are the only shadows of things that might be.
Ends deeds foreshadow certain ends.
But if the deeds be departed from, surely the ends will change.
So why does death, which he must have known was going to happen, why does it so terrify him?
So much of what happens in a Christmas carol depends on what Scrooge is willing to see, what he can see.
That is all the spirits do.
They show him things.
They never slap him upside the head.
It's not like that Bill Murray version of the Scrooge, where the spirit just beats the living crap out of him.
It's not like that.
They just show him things.
And Scrooge dismisses charity until he sees Fezziwig in the past giving so little money to make people joyful.
He curses the poor until he sees Tiny Tim in the presence.
And he doesn't believe in his own mortality until he sees his grave in the future.
And he begs the spirit for mercy.
And he says something else that's always puzzled me.
This is what he says to the spirit.
He pledges to change.
And he says, I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year.
And then he says, I will live in the past, the present, and the future.
The spirits of all three shall strive within me.
I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.
Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this headstone.
And I used to think, what does that mean to live in the past, the present, and the future?
What does it mean?
We all kind of have our memories, we all have our hopes for the future.
What does it mean to live in those three times?
Now I think it means to live as best we can in eternity, because that's what eternity is.
Eternity is not a long, long time that never ends.
It just goes on forever.
Eternity is all time at once.
And if you see the world through the perspective of eternity, all time, you are seeing it through the eyes of God.
And through the eyes of God, a lot of the things we care about don't matter.
For instance, questions of free will and predestination are meaningless to God because those exist in time.
I make a decision and then I carry it out, or I'm predestined.
Those things don't mean anything to God because he is in eternity when all those times exist at the same time.
And when God looks at you, no matter where you are right now, when you're hopeless, when you're feeling that you've lost your way, he sees you complete.
And if you ultimately are reborn, if you keep your hope and you keep your spirit and you find yourself reborn into a new world, he sees that now.
He's relating to you as the man reborn that you will be because that is already happening where he is.
And I really do believe that almost everything Jesus preaches in the gospels is not trying to make us be good or else.
It's trying to get us to see what he sees, what the world looks like from eternity, which will result in our changing our behavior toward each other, toward God, and toward the world.
In eternity, this heaven and earth are already the new heaven and new earth to come.
Okay?
We are living in paradise right this moment if we can see it through the screen of time on which is painted the disaster that we're in, the sin and the cruelty and the ruins that we're in.
And Jesus' words are trying to make us see through that screen that the kingdom of heaven is among you now.
It's among you now.
And he says, let my joy make your joy complete.
Don't worry.
Don't be afraid.
Judge not.
And why do you judge not?
Because in eternity, you see the whole person, which we can't see now.
But there's a famous poem by William Blake, the mystic romantic poet.
He said, throughout all eternity, I forgive you, you forgive me.
And that is what Jesus is trying to see.
And I really believe that insofar as there are rules in Christianity, thou shalt not, they're not there to test our virtue or to make us feel more virtuous than the other guy because we happen to be following one rule and he isn't.
There is practice to help us see, to help us see the true value of things, to help us see the world from eternity, where even shrouded in all this evil and corruption, it's already perfect.
So Scrooge is pledging to try to live in the past, the present, and the future, to try to see what Jesus sees.
And now he sees, he could have argued, well, you know, sure I'm going to die, but at least sure I'm going to die, but at least I got rich.
But no, when he sees death, he understands that it erases all of that.
And finally, Scrooge wakes up.
He's still alive.
He's overwhelmed with joy and he runs through the house, babbling like a madman.
Here's the scene, cut six.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with healthcare and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
I'm so evil I hate myself.
I'm sorry.
I could not resist.
I told myself, don't do it, but I couldn't resist.
Anyway, what makes Scrooge's final redemption so convincing and so moving is that it's completely undeserved and it fixes nothing in the past.
It changes nothing about the world except him.
And that changes everything.
There's one line in the movie that's not in the book, but should be.
One of my favorite lines in all the art.
Scrooge comes into work the day after he's been redeemed and he tells Bob Cratchit he's going to help him.
And Bob Cratchit is just stunned.
He can't believe it.
And here is that scene.
It's cut seven.
I haven't taken leave of my senses, Bob.
I've come to them.
From now on, I want to try to help you to raise that family of yours.
If you'll let me.
Well, we'll talk it over later, Bob, over a bowl of hot punch.
Meanwhile, you just go and put some more coal in that fire.
You go straight out and buy a new coal scuttle.
Isn't you do that before you dot another I, Bob Crackett?
I don't deserve to be so happy.
I can't help it.
I just can't help it.
That should be the motto of every Christian.
I don't deserve to be so happy, but I just can't help it if you're a true Christian and feel that joy.
It's just a remarkable line that Dickens did not write, but it is a great line.
So Scrooge, in his new self, looks around his rooms and he says, there's the door by which the ghost of Jacob Marley entered.
There's the corner where the ghost of Christmas presents sat.
There's the window where I saw the wandering spirits.
It's all right.
It's all true.
It all happened.
This is the opposite of what he said to Marley when he looked at a spirit, a living spirit right in front of him and said, I don't believe you exist.
You are a hallucination.
I'm seeing the spiritual world, but I don't believe in it.
Now he's seeing the natural world and he realizes it is the spiritual world.
It is.
It already is communicating through the love that people have for one another, through that creative force, that chaos in which desire is transformed into creation.
It's already there in the love that gives us a greater joy over time than any material pleasure can give us in the moment.
It's all already there.
This world is that world.
This world, this natural world, is the spiritual world.
And when he says it's all right, it's all true, it all happened.
He's not just referring to his story with the ghosts.
He's referring to the story of a virgin made with child by the Holy Spirit and born in a stable in Bethlehem, a poor, obscure Jewish man executed in a Roman backwater who was in fact in all of his fleshiness the presence of God, the Savior of the world, the natural man, was the God-man right there, right now.
And in realizing this, nothing again, nothing has changed but Scrooge, and that's everything, because now he is living in eternity.
So he can't fix the past.
Not going to be any reparations.
There are not going to be endless apologies.
The dead are dead.
The people he's hurt are hurt.
But he will live in the past, the presence, and the future in eternity.
And he promises that he will be better.
And here is the end of the story, a Christmas Carol.
The final lines, he says, Scrooge was better than his word.
He did it all and infinitely more.
And to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father.
He became 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.
And it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well.
If any man alive possessed the knowledge, may that be truly said of us and all of us.
And so as Tiny Tib observed, God bless us, everyone.
May that be truly said of us and of all of us.
So God bless you, my friends.
I am glad to be with you for Christmas.
I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful Christmas and a wonderful new year.