Tracy Cochran

In dark times it can be a healing exercise to remember the stories of others who have gone through darkness and emerged into light. Please don’t limit yourself to designated spiritual figures–the Buddha alone in the forest, or Jesus wandering in the desert.  Allow yourself to remember beloved stories and characters from books and films. Consider, for example, the deep truth in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In the course of one harrowing night of remembering, Scrooge moves from isolation to openness to life.

Scrooge, as most of us know, is a miserable, isolated man, “self-contained and solitary as an oyster.” On Christmas Eve, he finds himself alone in a cold and gloomy house, dismissing the need we all have for warmth and human company as “humbug.” He falls asleep, thinking only of the work he has to do. Enter the ghost of Scrooge’s business partner Marley, wrapped in chains made of cashboxes, ledgers, the objects of his attention in life.

“You are fettered,” says Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replies the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard.”

Marley warns Scrooge that he is forging his own chain and that his will be even longer than his own. In Buddhism, the fetters are mental bonds, habits of thought that limit us. Meditative awareness allows us to bring an accepting, non-judging attention to all the ways we have learned to brace ourselves, seeing that these braces became postures and attitudes and finally beliefs about this. But Scrooge doesn’t see this and rushes to defend the way his old partner is braced and bound. He reminds his old partner that he was “always a good man of business.”

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.”

Our real business here on earth is becoming more fully human, more aware and responsive.  The details of our work….So many of us are taught to focus on achievement and accomplishments, tangible proof that we have done something singular that matters, that we are singular and we matter. But now more than ever, sequestered as we are, we begin to see that our real work may be seeing and feeling moment by moment, opening to a greater life.

Marley moans and shakes his chains, terrifying Scrooge with the spectacle of spending a whole brief life like that, bound up in hurt and anger and delusion, missing the possibility we have to open to life in a new way.  What can possibly be done about this? How can we awaken?

(Part Two) We all have these frightening moments. We catch ourselves in the act of being caught up in this or that, or after the fact. Where did the time go? Why did I waste so much time in this narrative or that? In retrospect, we see ourselves trapped in delusion or aversion or craving something that turned out to be so not worth it.

Three more spirits come to Scrooge. These spirits bring moments of a deeper awareness of past, present, and future. Suddenly, Scrooge sees and feels what he usually misses, the poignancy and beauty of life, and he also feels how it is to be “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous.”

We long to see clearly and to be seen. Yet Marley’s ghost and the other spirits convey how startling this can be. It is said that the Buddha could see peoples’ past, present, and future–could see the source and the end of their suffering. Sometimes, when conditions are just right, we can see this way too. Such a gaze liberates. But it also burns because it awakens in us a feeling of the value of life. We see that life passes so swiftly, and that we miss quite a lot of it.

“This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness,” writes Mary Oliver.

Before he leaves, Marley’s ghost leads Scrooge to an open window where he sees “the air full of phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went.” They missed their chance to be present, really and truly alive, while they were here.

Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning, that it is not too late. He is overjoyed to discover that it is not too late to live his life in an entirely new way. As an experiment notice how it feels to imagine yourself beginning life anew. Notice how it feel to shift from old standards of achievement–amassing money or status or things–to qualities of heart and presence.  Imagine how it would feel to measure your life in moments of openness and loving friendship and generosity.