Christmas is a time famous for ghost stories. Marley’s ghost and those of Christmas past, future, and present in Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol have been revisited in film, drama, and musical. Christmas ghost stories were a Victorian tradition, with Dickens writing three stories, M.R. James writing two, and Henry James writing the Christmas gothic horror The Turn of the Screw. Sweet Christmas dreams, children.
As a contemporary of Dickens in England, John Henry Newman, also wrote about the unseen: “We are then in a world of spirits as well as in a world of sense, and we hold communion with it and take part in it, though we are not conscious of doing so.” He said this regarding the angels and Christ's appearances in both the Old and New Testaments. For example, according to the ancient Latin and Greek Church Fathers, when Jacob says in Genesis 32:30, after wrestling with a stranger through the night, "I have seen God face to face," it was Christ who was mysteriously present.
“Persons commonly speak of the other world as if the other world did not exist now but would after death,” Newman said. “No: it exists now, though we see it not. It is among us and around us. Jacob was shown this in a dream. Angels were all about him, though he knew it not. And what Jacob saw in his sleep, that Elisha’s servant saw with his eyes: and the shepherds at the time of the nativity not only saw but heard. They heard the voices of the blessed spirits who praise God day and night and whom we, in our lower state of being, are allowed to copy and assist.”
Newman stressed faith entails accepting the individuality of the soul. This means every person who has ever existed lives today in that unseen world. And what of those souls murdered by violence of arms this year, whether in Ukraine, Russia, Nigeria, Iran, Syria, Israel, or in a neighborhood near you? Whether it is wars, assassinations, drugs, violent crimes, or just the butchery of your friendly neighborhood abortionist, our world is haunted by the souls of the dead violently pushed into eternity by greed, envy, and hatred.
Is it any surprise that at the end of the year, people turn to ghost stories? The dead speak. Ghosts call from the grave to remind murderers of the murdered. Ghosts are here to remind us that vengeance is not theirs, but the Lord's.
When fear of God is dead in those who have murdered their consciences, can the fear in a ghost story help bring it back to life?
The words of Ebenezer Scrooge are as clear as the calm water in a tropical lagoon before the typhoon hits. "If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
No militarist could put it more precisely as they go about clearing surplus population from the land they covet. No mastermind filling city graveyards with the profits from the drug trade could be more precise. Begone, humanity – make way for me and my desires!
Of course, there is one who cannot be so easily dismissed as a fictional specter. The Holy Ghost, the spirit of Christ in the world, calls people to seek mercy before darkness falls. "I must work the works of him that sent me, whilst it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work." (John 9:4) The choices are stark. The eternal stakes are high.
The last word goes to G.K. Chesterton, another Victorian, who, like Dickens, despised the utilitarian industrial scale cruelty of the modern world. He wrote of Scrooge's comeuppance:
“It is notable also that Dickens gives the right reply; and that with a deadly directness worthy of a much older and more subtle controversialist. The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is the surplus population; or if he is not, how he knows he is not. That is the answer which the Spirit of Christmas gives to Scrooge; and there is more than one fine element of irony involved in it.”
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