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. We don’t have to limit ourselves to 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.”

We work so hard to stay alive, working things out so that we can be safe and happy. We strive to be somebody, to accomplish things. And yet our real business here on earth is being fully here.  We are made for presence, for compassion, for seeing and feeling and witnessing the life inside us and outside us. We are made for discovering our kinship with other beings. We are made to be kind.

Marley moans and shakes his chains, terrifying Scrooge with the spectacle of spending a whole brief life like that, bound up in the deluded belief that he is separate little fortress in a cold and hostile world. By dawn, Scrooge remembers that he was once a child. He remembers that he will die one day. He can no longer be “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous.”

At last Scrooge understands the preciousness of life.re

“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, body, heart, and mind!

Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning, realizing that it is not too late! May we, too, wake up knowing that kindness and generosity ate the way to be free.