“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, 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, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
Obviously, I recently reread A Christmas Carol. I’ve been reading this story every December for three decades. If the definition of a Great Book is one which you can reread many times and always discover something new, then A Christmas Carol is indisputably a Great Book.
If T.S. Eliot were to write A Christmas Carol, it would begin with an old man, stiffening in a decaying house, unconsciously saying, “I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact?” In the face of a dying world, we are all Ebenezer Scrooge. When I have noted in the past that we are living in the Waste Land, I am frequently met with an objection that the world isn’t all that bad. Indeed, to compare us all to Scrooge will strike many (most? all?) as absurd. So, consider anew Dickens’ tale. And then ask yourself, Whom do you Love?
Love has been unbelievably corrupted in the modern world. Consider this: When I say I love my wife and my kids, everybody nods politely. (Or, if they are Mount Holyoke students, they say “Ahh, that’s so sweet.”) If I say I love humanity, well, it’s actually just boilerplate and nobody will bat an eye. But if I say I love my students, then either it sounds like another banal triviality or something sounds a bit off. And if I were to look a student in the eye and say to her, “I love you”…well, you can imagine the reaction.
But why? The second greatest commandment is what?
But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22: 34-40, ESV)
And, what does it mean to love your neighbor?
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37, ESV)
Now I can say I love Humanity and that’s OK. But the Good Samaritan didn’t love Humanity; he loved the hurting man on the side of the road to Jericho. He loved him enough to make sacrifices for that man; he cared enough for that man to take the time to treat the man as if he was important, solely because that man was inherently important. The Good Samaritan is a model of love.
And Scrooge is also a model of love. Scrooge is what we can become. Because of Christmas, because in the juvescence of the year /Came Christ the tiger, we have the possibility of loving our neighbors.
Yet, we have no language with which we can express that love. I do love my students. It’s my Christian obligation to do so, but that doesn’t make the love somehow less genuine.
Some of my students I love a lot. I hope those students know that, but sometimes I am not sure they do. It is surely a sign of the poverty not of our language but of our culture that I cannot simply tell those students, “You know, of course, that I love you.” Most of the time, this probably doesn’t matter all that much. But every now and then, I have been talking to a student, for whom the simple statement “I love you” would make a world of difference, and yet because of the degradation of our culture, there is no way to say those words without the very real risk of them being terribly and horribly misunderstood.
We all know that feeling loved is vital to the human soul; it is not some strange accident that the two greatest commandments are both about Love. And yet, we have lost the ability to express the very idea of a love without an overtone of the romantic or the erotic or the merely abstract.
And so, this Christmastime, I want to say to those students, both current and past, with whom I have a deep bond of friendship, and I hope you know who you are: I love you. A lot.
If you haven’t read A Christmas Carol yet this year, I’d highly recommend it. And, even better, read the text from which that book draws its moral lesson. Then, emulate Scrooge at the end of the story, and pick someone you know who is not a member of your family and for whom you feel no romantic or erotic attachment at all, and tell that person, “I love you.”
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