It's something I do every year. Plow through every incarnation of that Dickens story I can find.
There's the little matter of the book, of course, ever since I first read it in my single digits. And every movie. And every animated version. And an awesome little novella that tells the story from Jacob Marley's point of view, and it's about time (that one was a present from my boyfriend on our first Christmas together, the boyfriend I later married, he so gets me). For ten years running there was even the live performance in New York, with my sister (and just fyi, she and I still haven't forgiven whomever's responsible for cutting off our beloved tradition at the knees, and neither one of us can stand hearing any part of the Alan Menken score anymore, makes our eyes go wet and our hearts break audibly).
Anyway, to my point, I do this every December. Over and over. And every year, and in every rendition, something crazy happens. Something rises up from the pages, sneaks off the stage, seeps out of the the screen, right into me...something I could swear up and down that I'd never seen or heard or felt or known before. I get something new each Christmas, with new eyes, and new ears, and maybe even a new heart.
How does a story do that?
I don't know either, but I'll tell you what it was this year. It was that moment when Mrs. Cratchit asks her husband how Tiny Tim behaved in church that day. As expected, Bob Cratchit gives her the scoop that Tim had been "good as gold and better." And Bob goes on to deliver that little speech about his son, as the rest of his family sits around and listens--lines that I've read and heard and seen and felt, and read and heard and seen and felt, over and over, so many times.
"Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant for them to remember, upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk and blind men see."
Bob's voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.
Bob's voice was tremulous...and trembled more.
That's what did it to me this year.
His voice was tremulous...and trembled more. Of course it was. Of course it did. Mine sure as hell would have done. The thoughts that floated around Bob Cratchit. Thoughts about how this little child, lodged so much into his heart as to be a part of it, so fragile and bent and broken and wrongly made, so imperfect in the eyes of a world that will not see, ending up being the very vehicle to maybe teach the world around him about the highest force in existence.
Perfect love, that is. Just a little thing like that.
And p.s., in case you don't already know this about me, I could NOT care less what your name for this force is. I really and truly don't care. I don't care what kind of a building you visit to focus your thoughts on this force, or if you don't go anywhere at all. I also don't care which famous ginormous book you might leaf through to help you fathom it, or if you go by a book at all. That you or I or any of us grope our way to feel the force, and come to have it strong with with us in our time, even now and then, in ups and downs, matters more to me, and who cares how. Really. So in A Christmas Carol, it's the Christ child that's understood as the catalyst to explode perfect love into the world. But a little disabled boy holding hands with his father in a tiny country church--that's who Dickens sees as having a ghost of a chance (sorry) to carry such an understanding into the here and now. To the regular people going about their business and living their lives around him. If they even let themselves notice him at all.
A little "broken" boy.
Is there anything that could possibly grip your heart harder? Me neither.
And somehow I've never paused and become "tremulous" about it in such a soul-stopping way, right along with Mr. and Mrs. Cratchit, and all the assundry little Cratchits, until this very time. Go figure.
Dammit, EVERYTHING makes me cry these last few days before Christmas day. I blame Dickens, I really do.
But that's ok. It really is.
Good as gold and better.
Happy Merry Everything.
Love you,
T
