A Holiday Miracle

And a guidebook for the year ahead

“Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball” (1849) Gutenberg Project/Public Domain

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When the world tilts away from the sun at its poles, and the days there become shorter and colder, we light candles and fires to warm our bodies and our spirits. It’s good that we do this.

Speaking of warmth, I’m pulling out my dog-eared copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (no cold Kindle for that old chestnut!) for my annual read through. I also like to watch the 1951 black-and-white (non-”colorized”) movie starring Alastair Sim if I can find it streaming somewhere. Oh how happy that story of crisis and redemption makes me after a year of viewing so much of the worst of human nature.

The business of change

I have worked with many people who said they wanted to change for the better. Most of them did not.

Deep and lasting change, in both individuals and organizations, mostly happens when the following elements are present:

• A crisis

• The right guide

• Personal responsibility/ownership

• The right plan

The crisis brings a level of suffering (not just garden variety unhappiness) that focuses the mind and disrupts the status quo.

The right guide offers understanding, hope and a methodology for building a credible pathway out of pain.

Ownership involves resisting our default tendency to blame other people for our pain and expect them to end our suffering.

The right plan consists of an evidence-based strategy for dealing with the real facts on the ground.

A story about change

The protagonist of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is a money lender, a capitalist, a man of business and the balance sheet and the bottom line. He reckons all his affairs in terms of return on investment, and aims to profit from every encounter. His views on human relationships are revealed in this interchange with the representative of a local charity:

Charity: “At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge, ... it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time."
Scrooge: "Are there no prisons?"
Charity: "Plenty of prisons..."
Scrooge: "And the Union workhouses. Are they still in operation?"
Charity: "Both very busy, sir..."
Scrooge: "Well those who are badly off must go there."
Charity: "Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
Scrooge: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

And so Scrooge rejects the opportunity to care about others, and carries on with his grasping narcissism.

And then, in the quiet darkness and depths of sleep, the crisis comes as it so often does when the mind is deprived of its distractions and default routines. In the hands of a master storyteller like Charles Dickens, the crisis takes the form of a visitation by the spirit of Scrooge’s deceased business partner Jacob Marley. Marley, to put it simply, is imprisoned in the hell of his own guilt, wandering the world endlessly and observing the suffering towards which he was so blind and uncaring in life. He suffers the regret and remorse of insights come too late. As his final act of repentance and redemption, Jacob aims to save his partner in crime from a similar fate.

Jacob Marley is a brilliant therapist and spiritual counselor with magical skills in his tool box! He understands that Scrooge is just too comfortable in his little life to have any real motivation to change. And so, with love and care, he prescribes for his old partner the just right dosage of pain and guidance to open his eyes, mind and heart.

When Scrooge defends himself against criticism of his cold and calculating narcissism by protesting that he is just a good man of business, Marley cries out:

Business! 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!

But Scrooge’s heart remains hardened and unmoved, so Marley sends three spirits to invade Scrooge’s sleeping chambers and wake him up to his evil ways. These spirits perform a fantabulous psychoanalysis by confronting Scrooge with his forgotten past, his unedited present, and his likely future if he fails to change his life’s trajectory.

Past as prologue

It is the intervention of the Spirit of Christmas Past, through the power of memory and the remembrance of his tender budding self, that cracks the ice around Scrooge’s heart and drives him on to fuller understanding and his ultimate redemption. He revisits his beloved and loving sister Fan who provided him with the only warmth in his shattered family, like the small lump of coal glowing in his clerk Bob Cratchit’s office stove. Scrooge also encounters through reminiscence his first boss (and benevolent father figure) in the joyous character of Nigel Fezziwig.

In a luminous scene, Fezziwig launches his annual Christmas party to bring a dose of holiday cheer to his employees. When the Spirit of Christmas Past strategically ridicules the employees’ deep affection for Fezziwig, Scrooge leaps to his defense with an uncharacteristic display of emotion:

The Spirit signed to Scrooge to listen to the two apprentices who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig, and when he had done so, said: “Why, he has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”

“It isn’t that,” said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self. “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks, in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up. The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

Young Ebenezer loves Fezziwig who commits the cardinal sin of business by failing to ruthlessly extract every drop of value from his workers and customers to plump up the balance sheet. Ultimately his little firm is taken over by corporate raiders, all value stripped out, and the carcass thrown into bankruptcy court. Scrooge takes that lesson of failure to heart and forgets Fezziwig’s earlier and more valuable teachings until reminded of them by the spirit of memory.

A change for the better

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

Many of us make New Year’s and other resolutions to change for the better. We enter into those plans with the best of intentions and stumble in the execution when the discomfort or sacrifice feels too great. It’s just the way the change business works.

But when the necessary and sufficient conditions for real change (crisis + right guide + ownership + right plan) are met, the results can be thrilling indeed. Listen to Scrooge after his night of trials and tribulation:

“I don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!”

If you could bottle this elixir and sell it as an anti-depressant or the hot new coaching program (“1000% return on investment!”), you might get to be as rich as old Scrooge. But better to be as the new version and share these good tidings with the world for free.

During this season of Black Friday deals and after-Christmas sales and delivery trucks playing bumper cars on your street, a little of Scrooge and Marley’s late discovered charity wouldn’t hurt. For nothing less than a generous and compassionate spirit can put out the many fires, environmental and cultural, that are raging about us now and threatening our very survival and that of the whole world. Look around. There are many worthy guides available to help us if we will only take some shared responsibility for the crisis we are in.

Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity.  — Gautama Siddhartha (Buddha)

Finale

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world.

Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.

It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!

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