When my husband and I visited England in September, we came upon something that was not listed in our very-packed travel itinerary: The Charles Dickens Museum in King’s Cross, London. This museum at 48 Doughty Street was where Dickens and his family lived in the late 1830’s. On one of the upper floors was the desk at which he wrote many of his novels, novellas and short stories. As a fellow author of 15 novels released under the penname Ashland Price by New York publishers, I was particularly awed by being able to stand just a few inches from the very desk where so much socially meaningful literature was written. Yet, despite Dickens’ long list of publications, A CHRISTMAS CAROL will always be the favorite for most of us. What’s more, this story is intriguing to me not only as an author, but as a medium who professionally communicates with the dead on a weekly basis. The novella,
A CHRISTMAS CAROL has been produced so many times as a stage-play, teleplay and screenplay, that I will assume you’re familiar with the storyline by now. So, I won’t go into great detail about the plot. I’ll simply say that it is set in London on Christmas Eve of 1843, seven years to the day of the death of Ebenezer Scrooge’s business partner, Jacob Marley. It is very much a ghost story, taking place during this dark and demanding time of year that always feels to me like a “time of reckoning.” It’s a time when you must edit your Christmas card list due to all of the changed addresses, divorces and deaths that have occurred in the past 12 months. You have to assess your health insurance coverage, and you must rush about trying to do right by your family and friends in time for the Holidays. It’s one big deadline, and nobody understands the magnitude of a deadline quite like a novelist! (I know this from facing 15 of them for 500-page books!)
This deadline awareness is particularly true in the case of Charles Dickens, who decided to self-publish A CHRISTMAS CAROL and ended up with just a matter of weeks in which to write it and have a freelance artist create the illustrations for it! This process usually requires months to a year. Dickens’ goal was to get it into bookstores well before Christmas that year. It was a huge professional and financial gamble that happily resulted in his first printing of the book being completely sold out by December 24th! It was an absolute feat for Dickens who, in a household filled with his noisy young children, squawky pets, his birth family members and in-laws, raced to complete this masterpiece of a story while trying to keep peace and happiness on the home front! As is true with all well-plotted fiction, the main character in A CHRISTMAS CAROL must deal with his antagonist(s.) There is no way around it. Thus, the ghosts haunting Scrooge are simply inescapable, turning up on the face of his front-door knocker, at his bedroom windows and within his locked quarters in the middle of the night.
Jacob Marley is a scary ghost. He yells at Scrooge and drags a long, thunderous chain behind him, which he explains is composed of the sins he “forged” in life. He is a tortured soul who is desperately trying to spare his old friend and partner Scrooge the same fate. Above all, Marley seems to be warning of the disease of greed. A self-imposed blindness to the many people he could have helped in the world of the living, if not for his compulsive death grip on all of his money. It was wealth that he could not have taken with him to the Other Side, in any case.
Yet, for all of his earthly prosperity, Marley is depicted as little more than a tormented slave in the afterlife. He is a bound servant, having no choice but to roam the earth dragging behind him heavy chains, as well as the metal boxes he filled with money during his lifetime. Marley’s suffering is terrifying and palpable, and Scrooge cannot help begging him to “speak comfort” to him about the Other Side. But Marley replies, “I have none to give. 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 our 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!'
As a medium, I can relate to almost everything Marley is trying to explain here. I often encounter situations where my clients’ loved ones are not permitted to tell me more. This is particularly true of questions about when a living loved one is likely to die.
Fortunately, I’ve never heard of deceased individuals being sentenced to haul their sins and greedy holdings behind them endlessly. But I’ve certainly been told many times of lower, remedial levels of Heaven where recently deceased souls are forced to stay until they’ve done the work of recognizing and atoning for their trespasses. This dimension of Heaven addresses the subject of making amends, much like a 12-step program does here on earth. This is the realm in which I am able to contact individuals who committed suicide or unsuccessfully battled addiction problems in life.
These lower levels of Heaven don’t seem like Purgatory to me. In fact, they look and feel a lot like college campuses, where the emphasis is on recognizing one’s blind spots, attaining enlightenment and being given more chances to right one’s wrongs against others. My spirit guides have told me to refer to this as their “angel work.” And souls who wish to advance to higher levels of the afterlife seem very motivated to complete it.
Fortunately, unlike the ghost of Jacob Marley, we mediums are usually able to “speak comfort” to our clients and convey the fact that Heaven seems to be essentially a forgiving place. And, as Charles Dickens himself was fond of saying, “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” Our smallest kindnesses can make all the difference to those around us.
While touring Dickens’ house, it occurred to me that his existence, when he was writing A CHRISTMAS CAROL one-hundred-and-eighty-one years ago, was not so very different from ours today. The wealth divide in England, which sent Dickens himself to a paupers’ factory in his boyhood, is still alive and well in our own country, where U.S. billionaires are now estimated to hold nearly half the money. And charitable giving in the U.S. has dropped consistently since 2010 as billionaires continue to claim more and more of our incomes.
But Dickens, in A CHRISTMAS CAROL, gives us a message that some people miss when seeing or reading this Heaven-sent work: it’s a story about just one man ultimately deciding to do what he can to help others in his little corner of the world. He’s not trying to face down global strife, he’s just helping those people God has put in his path. And, if we all did that, this world would surely improve overnight!
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