Every Christmas season Aidan and I like to read through A Christmas Carol sitting by our Christmas tree in the living room.
You'll recall that A Christmas Carol opens on Christmas Eve with the death of Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge's business partner. Seven years after his death Marley returns to Scrooge as a ghost wrapped in chains.
I think the conversation between Scrooge and Marley is profound. It's my favorite part of the book. Below is the text from the scene from Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I've highlighted in red my favorite parts:
At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if it were too warm to wear in-doors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast.Mankind is our business.
Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.
'Mercy!' he said. 'Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?' 'Man of the worldly mind!' replied the Ghost, 'do you believe in me or not?'
'I do,' said Scrooge. 'I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?'
'It is required of every man,' the Ghost returned, 'that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world-oh, woe is me!-and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness.'
Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.
'You are fettered,' said Scrooge, trembling. 'Tell me why?'
'I wear the chain I forged in life,' replied the Ghost. 'I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?'
Scrooge trembled more and more.
'Or would you know,' pursued the Ghost, 'the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!
Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing.
'Jacob,' he said, imploringly. 'Old Jacob Marley, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob.'
'I have none to give,' the Ghost replied. 'It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor can I tell you what I would. A very little more is all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked beyond out counting-house-mark me!- in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me.'
It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets. Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did so now, but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his knees.
'You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,' Scrooge observed, in a business-like manner, though with humility and deference.
'Slow!' the Ghost repeated.
'Seven years dead,' mused Scrooge. 'And travelling all the time?'
'The whole time,' said the Ghost. 'No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.'
'You travel fast?' said Scrooge.
'On the wings of the wind,' replied the Ghost.
'You might have got over a great quantity of ground in seven years,' said Scrooge.
The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the Ward would have been justified in indicting it for a nuisance.
'Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,' cried the phantom, 'not to know, that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed! Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness! Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!'
'But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
'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!'
Profound indeed. I, too, love this story.
Business. I have a great respect for business. Yet, when I think of the working class Christians today who have a reverence for big business that borders on idolatry, it makes me feel that our society has been stood upon its head. The following poem by Thomas Alan Orr speaks of how things used to be.
Soybeans
by Thomas Alan Orr
The October air was warm and musky, blowing
Over brown fields,
heavy with the fragrance
Of freshly combined beans, the breath of
harvest.
He was pulling a truckload onto the scales
At the elevator
near the rail siding north of town.
When a big Cadillac drove up. A man
stepped out,
Wearing a three-piece suit and a gold pinky ring.
The man
said he had just invested a hundred grand
In soybeans and wanted to see what
they looked like.
The farmer stared at the man and was quiet,
reaching
For the tobacco in the rear pocket of his jeans,
Where he wore
his only ring, a threadbare circle rubbed
By working cans of dip and long
hours on the backside
Of a hundred acre run. He scooped up a handful
Of
small white beans, the pearls of the prairie, saying:
Soybeans look like
a foot of water on the field in April
When you're ready to plant and can't
get in;
Like three kids at the kitchen table
Eating macaroni and cheese
five nights in a row;
Or like a broken part on the combine when
Your
credit with the implement dealer is nearly tapped.
Soybeans look like
prayers bouncing off the ceiling
When prices on the Chicago grain market
start to drop;
Or like your old man's tears when you tell him
How much the
land might bring for subdivisions.
Soybeans look like the first good night of
sleep in weeks.
When you unload at the elevator and the kids get
Christmas.
He spat a little juice on the tire of the
Cadillac,
Laughing despite himself and saying to the man:
Now maybe you
can tell me what a hundred grand looks like.
I remember a time when most Evangelicals would have admired the farmer in this poem. Now I fear, and it saddens me, that many today would think to themselves that he was rude and disrespectful to the business man.