Advent Week 2 | Peace
Stave Two: The Ghost of Christmas Past
(Note: This essay is on the the longer side. It’s a good one to break up into multiple readings through the week. Also, please forgive any typos. Either Substack’s spellcheck function is lacking, or my ability to utilize it fully is—probably the latter.)
Read: Genesis 2; Isaiah 9:6; 26:3-4; John 14:26-27; 16:33; Col 3:15; (the entire chapter for greater context) Hebrew 4:3-11
If you’ve ever been through counseling, you know the most common starting point for any therapist: Tell me about your past.
So it is with Scrooge.
As Marley promised, The Ghost of Christmas Past comes to Scrooge, much to his dismay. Its appearance alone is note-worthy; a series of contrasts and contradictions that leave Scrooge—and us—befuddled.
It was a strange figure—like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view and being diminished to a child’s proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this 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.
Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness, was not its strangest quality. For as its belt glittered now in one part and now in another, and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever.
What does all this mean? What is Dickens doing with this Ghost’s appearance?
Of course, we are meant to wonder over it; to use our imaginations to ponder the ways this Ghost’s very presentation reflects all that the past can mean to us.
First, is its stunning quality of being both old and young. William Faulkner, in his novel, Requiem for a Nun, writes: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” There is, I think, something of this same idea Dickens is trying to express in the Ghost. Whether or not we can articulate it, we instinctively feel Faulkner’s words in our own lives. We know it by the way those childhood moments living deep in the folds of our memories come rushing at us with a particular sound or scent. We recognize it by the way we carry our past influences into our present days: whether these are as benign as the habits of housekeeping, or as inflammatory as those assumptions and attitudes we insert into our relationships.
Then there is the way the Ghost acts as a shape shifter: from one leg to twenty, from full light and clarity to blurred into the gloom. Isn’t this just like our past? Sometimes we see past moments as through a fog, other times in crystal clear distinctness. We remember an event or conversation one way, only to hear another person tell it completely different. And then there is the way we recollect the same memory in new ways—for better or worse—as time goes by.
But, it is the light coming from its head that is its most distinct feature, and makes Scrooge most uneasy.
Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.
“What!” exclaimed the Ghost, “would you so soon put out with worldly hands, the light I give? is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow!”
The Ghost came to shine light on Scrooge’s past. To help him see it clear. For it is essential we see our pasts clearly in order to move forward into peace.
But, as Scrooge’s reaction to the Ghost’s light suggests, the process of seeing our past with clarity is often shot through with pain. Before they even begin their journey, Scrooge intuits this. He asks the Ghost to put on its cap, and the Ghost responds with sound rebuke. “Would you so soon put out with worldly hands, the light I give?”
“…the light has come into the world,” Jesus told his disciples, “and people loved the darkness rather than the light….”
We, as did Scrooge, have a choice to make: we turn our back on the Past and reject the light of truth it offers us. Or, we can trust the Spirit’s good intentions, touch our hands upon its heart, and, like Scrooge, “be upheld” even as we are flown precariously over the canyon of our pasts, seeing afresh by the Past’s light into those places we’d long buried and left behind us.
If we can commit to the second, what comes is nothing less than a cleansing: a baptism into shalom peace, the Hebrew word for wholeness, or completeness.
From the beginning of Scrooge and the Ghost’s journey into his past, Scrooge is beset with tears: first a single tear he won’t admit is there, then a free flow of sobbing—three separate times, the narrator tells us. With each fresh bout of tears, Scrooge’s sight is miracled, and his heart turned to understanding. After seeing his young self alone in his former school house reading books as his only Christmas company, Scrooge wishes he’d acted differently toward the young caroler that sang outside his workplace door. After seeing his sister fetch him to go home, our narrator implies that Scrooge wishes he’d been more kind to his nephew, Fred. After the beautiful and raucous party at the Fezziwigs, Scrooge recognizes the power he has to make his clerk, Bob Cratchet, happy or unhappy, “his service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil.”
These seemingly small acknowledgments are really movements toward shalom. It is a peace we cannot manufacture for ourselves. It must be given from above.
And it has been! Jesus came to be our peace. He came to bring us back to complete union with the Father as was intended in the beginning. He alone, can give us the peace we so desperately long for, and wrongly seek—like Scrooge—through idol means. The idols leave us hollow, like them. But Jesus, through the Helper—much like the Ghost of Christmas Past—gently, but firmly, leads us through, in order that we might move forward into full image bearing life.
There is one other image presented in Stave Two of A Christmas Carol I think worth noting and connecting to peace. It’s an image we normally connect with love, and rightly so. However, in the context of peace as shalom, it offers us a beautiful image of the Trinity, and our our relationship with the Triune God. It is the image of marriage.
The Ghost of Christmas Past brings Scrooge to recollect three different scenes of his past where marriage, or the broken promise of it, plays a prominent role. The first is the Fezziwigs. The second is his own broken engagement. The third is the happy marriage of Scrooge’s lost love, now complete in the warm love of her husband and children, and full of contentment in the home they’ve made together.
In the Fezziwigs we are given witness to the abundant peace poured out by a man and woman unioned in real love. We see it in the way our narrator gives long and detailed attention to the Christmas party the Fezziwigs host for their employees and friends, culminating most appropriately in the dance of Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig:
Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them….
But if they had been twice as many: ah, four times: old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that’s not high praise, tell me higher, and I’ll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig’s calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons.
Both Fezziwigs, our narrator suggests, is of the highest character. But together, culminating in their dance (portrayed often by C. S. Lewis as a vision of the relational beauty of the Trinity), a “positive light” shines out like that of the moon, the lesser light of creation. It is the same way man and woman together in the holy union of loving marriage offer a “lesser” light, or a small image of the Trinitarian love, that can’t help but pour itself out to produce abundant life all around it.
The second image of marriage we’re given is one of brokenness; the promise of wholeness rejected. Again, it is a “lesser light” image of one’s rejection of Christ’s desire to be unioned with him. In Scrooge’s fiancée, Belle, we see one who is pure and humble and wise. She is a “dowerless girl,” as Jesus was “without beauty or majesty” to attract us to him (Isaiah 53:2). We recognize her years of sacrifice, patiently waiting for Scrooge to union with her fully. He doesn’t, and we feel the pain of fracture—for both Belle, and for Scrooge.
And then we see Belle later—in the third image of marriage our narrator shares wtih us—surrounded by the love of a happy home and hearth. Clearly, she is one who loves well, and would have done so with Scrooge, had he not replaced her with his “golden idol,” as Israel worshipped their golden calf (Exodus 32). She has found one who would gladly receive her love and love her in return. Unioned together, their home abounds in a life of “joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy… all indescribable alike.”
“But to all who did receive him, who did believe in his name, he gave the right to become children of God…” (John 1:12)
It is this last image that sends Scrooge over the edge. The light is too piercing. The pain, too fierce. “He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon him with a face, in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.”
To be with the past as Scrooge was, and allow its Truth-bearing light to do its transformational work, will no doubt be a great wrestling. But if we want the kind of peace that only Christ can give, we must, like Scrooge and Jacob before him, reckon with the truth of where, and who, we’ve been.
The wonder of it is that even in the pain and wrestling, God is merciful! He offers us the healing balm of promised peace revealed even in the wilderness: the warm companionship of fictional characters given in seasons of wilderness; the bright love of a little sister; the generous mentorship of a father-figure to stand in for the father that never was.
All these are sign-posts of His ever-present, always offered peace.
May we be willing to reach our hands out to His heart alone; to not let go in the wrestling; that we, too, may enter into the fullness of His peace. It alone brings the rest we long for. The wholeness we seek.
Further opportunities for exploring Peace:
Using a Study Bible, find more passages of peace that are meaningful to you. Spend 10-20 minutes reflecting on these passages through meditation and journaling. Look for stories where peace (or lack thereof) is the result. Look also for unexpected images of peace—the way we considered marriage above, or the ways rest and shalom-peace go together. (Genesis and Hebrews)
Read and engage with George Herbert’s poem, Peace. What images stand out to you? Write them down. Consider the poem’s form. How does it speak to you?
Using Herbert’s poem as a launching point, write your own letter to Peace. Begin with Herbert’s opening line: “Sweet Peace, where dost thou dwell?”
Look at The Wedding Dance, by Pieter Bruegel (either above, or through the link provided. Click on the image in Wikipedia to enlarge it). Use the practice of Visio Divina to engage with the painting.
With the help of the Holy Spirit, and possibly a trusted advisor or friend, spend time this week visiting your past. What might the Lord be inviting you to wrestle with? To pierce you through in order to move you toward wholeness? Or, maybe He’s inviting you to recognize those forgotten glimmers of His promised peace given in otherwise long seasons of brokenness and pain. Maybe (most likely) He’s inviting you into both: healing-pain and praise.