The way of the wicked is like darkness;
they do not know over what they stumble.
—Proverbs 4:19, NASB
If you go to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, you can see, in Charles Dickens’s own handwriting, the original manuscript of A Christmas Carol. You can see the words of Ebenezer Scrooge before the miserable businessman had his epiphany: “Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”
If you turn on the television this Christmas season, you are likely to see Frank Capra’s iconic film It’s a Wonderful Life, where the greedy, crude banker Mr. Potter says, “George, I am an old man and most people hate me. But I don’t like them, either, so that makes it all even. You know just as well as I do that I run practically everything in this town but the Bailey Building and Loan. You know, also, that for a number of years, I’ve been trying to get control of it. Or kill it.”
If you turn to the Gospels, you will read that over 2,000 years ago King Herod, with his ego and envy, heard that a new king was born in a small village called Bethlehem, so he ordered the slaying of all baby boys in the region because he feared his authority would be threatened by a more powerful monarch.
Do we live in a new world where our leaders govern because of their insecurities and hunger for power? Do we live in Pottersville, where money and strength take precedence over humility and compassion? Do we live in a country where poverty, hunger, medical needs, and sorrow are greeted with a single phrase: “Bah, humbug”?
Recently, for the thirty-ninth time, my wife and I drove to the Christmas tree farm we visit each December. I brought a small saw; she brought mittens and hot chocolate.
The past few years, I’d kept my disappointment to myself: same tree farm, same walk among the trees, same “This one is too short; this one is too thin.” I miss the days when our three children ran ahead of us. “This one, Daddy! This one!”
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the novelist Milan Kundera wrote: “Everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.” I miss the way my daughter’s face lit up when we began to decorate the tree in the living room. I miss walking with my father down to the Methodist church to visit the life-sized nativity that was lit up with a soft spotlight.
Each year in our little town of Pompton Plains, Robbie Jones sets up Santa and his reindeer on top of his hardware store, and each year I look for the small, red-lit nose of Rudolf. Again, I place a single electric candle in each of our windows. I try to keep the true light of Christmas burning.
But the world’s lights seem to be dimming. I admit that I find myself more and more crying out for nostalgia, wishing things didn’t change.
In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway wrote that the old man “no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach.”
It is hard these days to dream of great occurrences and great fish and contests of strength and goodness and compassion and holiness and Christmas and God and joy when Herod is still trying to kill the baby in Bethlehem, when Pottersville is spreading throughout the country, when the Scrooge side of our national psyche is weaving into our lives with threads of ego, greed, and fear.
Lord, protect us from evil, equip us with the light of your love.
Guide us through the darkness, and place our hands on your face,
so that we recognize you even with our eyes closed.