Christmas Day 2011

“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 door-nail.”

In A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens, the bicentenary of whose birth is celebrated next year, tells the story of the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is transformed from a man described as “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, and covetous” in the opening pages, to a man described as “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew” in the closing pages.

Set as it is on Christmas Eve it is Scrooge’s opinion of the festivities that surround him that serves as the benchmark of his transformation. At the beginning that opinion is crystallized with admirable clarity in one unforgettable word. Christmas is humbug. “If I could work my will” says Scrooge “every idiot who goes around with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly though his heart”. At the end that opinion has changed. Out on the London streets he “regarded everyone with a delighted smile” writes Dickens. “He looked so irresistibly pleasant…that three or four good-humoured fellows said, ‘Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to you!’ And Scrooge often said afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears”.

Scrooge’s early opinion of Christmas is forged by his analysis of its costs and benefits. Christmas brings no profit and it impoverishes those who indulge in it. “What reason have you to be merry?” he asks his kindly nephew. “What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer?” But by the end that analysis is abandoned. Scrooge despatches an impossibly large turkey to Bob Cratchit’s family, increases his salary, and gives liberally to the poor. When we meet Scrooge he knows his own mind. When we leave him he is beginning to know his own heart.

During Advent at St Peter’s, conscious that the lives of disciples begin with the decision to follow Christ, we reflected Sunday by Sunday upon how decisions are made, and, consequently, upon the deployment of knowledge in the making of decisions. In A Christmas Carol we encounter two kinds of knowledge, the knowledge of the mind, and the knowledge of the heart. We encounter their relationship, and we encounter their conflict. This encounter is a theme emphasized and re-emphasized by writers on prayer. Augustine of Hippo writes of the lower part of the mind, that reasons, and of the higher part, reserved for the contemplation of God. Evagrius of Pontus distinguishes between the reasoning mind that makes use of concepts, and the dimension of the mind that comes to knowledge directly, without their mediation. The mind knows facts, figures, and forecasts. The heart knows pains, pleasures and personalities. The mind understands information. The heart understands others. It is the heart that is the sphere of God’s communication with us and God’s activity within us. It is in our hearts and through our hearts and with our hearts that we are drawn to God, we respond to God and we love God.

This is not to relegate God and faith in God to the far reaches of emotive speculation, where the late Christopher Hitchens and his supporters long to locate them. The human mind can take human beings great distances along the road of faith. Scrooge’s nephew gives us an example. “Christmas time” he says “is the only time I know of…when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good”. In other words, he assesses the objective benefits that the observance of Christmas brings and concludes that such observance is worthwhile. But what changes in Scrooge, and what changes Scrooge, is the disposition of his heart, a change effected by the visitation of the three Spirits. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows him the lonely child he once was. The Ghost of Christmas Present shows him the generous affection that warms the home of others at Christmas. And the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him the squalor and loneliness of his approaching death. The Spirits do not argue with him. They do not seek to convince him or make a case for him to answer. They hold up a mirror in which he sees his life and the life of the world. What he sees there speaks directly to his heart. What he sees there changes it, and that change in his heart changes his mind.

The knowledge of the heart and the knowledge of the mind have to be balanced. The nineteenth-century Russian monk Theophan the Recluse, canonized in 1988, writes “You must descend from your head to your heart”. What I think he means is that if our restless, questioning, calculating minds are joined to – or perhaps reined in by - our open, trusting, loving hearts; that if through persistence and effort, trial and error, mistake and mishap we learn to subject all our certainties, all our convictions, everything we think we know to what Almighty God longs for us to know; that then and only then will we stand a chance of becoming Christlike, as, perhaps, did Ebenezer Scrooge

Like him, we have awoken on Christmas morning and come to Church, where our eyes fasten on the crib and on the figure of the One who:“…came down to earth from heaven,
who is God and Lord of all”. We’ve sung it countless times and this morning we celebrate it: the humble descent of the divine to the mortal, and their union in the Christ-child. And we who have come in spirit to Bethlehem, we too must make a humble descent, the descent from the mind to the heart. We too must seek a union, a union of mind and heart, so that in all our thinking and acting and speaking we show forth the Word who is made flesh for our sake. It’s what Phillips Brooks meant when he wrote these words:

“O holy child of Bethlehem
Descend to us we pray,
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born in us today”.

Be born in us today. God bless us, every one. Amen.