The Chains We Forge in Life

Scrooge, Marley, and what our words say about us

Christmas Eve settled over London with the kind of cold that bit straight through wool. The fog lay against the rooftops like a second skin, and by late afternoon, the daylight had already drained away, leaving the streets dim and the air full of thick smoke. Passersby hurried home, their faces buried in scarves and collars.

Ebeneezer Scrooge climbed the steps to his rooms, the fog trailing in behind him before the door latched. A single candle gave off a thin circle of light, and Scrooge moved through the corridor with the sort of weariness that comes at the end of a long year or a meaningless life.

The quiet was the first thing he noticed. The city itself carried a deep stillness. No carts. No footsteps. Not the shouts of children or the urging of vendors.

Then the bell on the wall moved.

It was a small vibration, so slight it might have been caused by a draft in the once grand home. The metal trembled again. Scrooge watched it tilt, the movement deliberate enough that he knew it hadn’t been his imagination. In the next moment, the other bells in the house began to stir — soft, scattered, then gathering themselves into a single, rising sound that traveled through the stairwell and into the rooms beyond. The noise filled the house the way fog filled the streets outside: slowly, completely, without asking permission.

Then the bells fell silent. The stillness that followed felt different from before, as though something had entered the room without making a sound.

From the floor below came a heavy scrape. The sound advanced step by step, climbing the stairs.

Scrooge sat in frozen disbelief as a figure apparated through the closed door, a long chain wound around his body, links crowded with iron boxes and keys and locks that shifted as they moved.

Scrooge knew the man at once. He also knew that he had been buried in the cemetery years before. He had stood at a graveside and watched the earth fall over that same set of features, pale and still. Yet here the man stood, looking at him with eyes that were very much awake.

The figure stepped close to the hearth, the chain settling around him like the weight of a life accounted for.

“I wore the chain I forged in life,” he said, gesturing at the representation of all he had been, and all he had failed to be.

Outside, the city lay under a blanket of cold and fog, waiting for the hope of morning. Inside, Scrooge was now facing a truth he had managed to outrun until that fateful Christmas Eve.

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Across the ocean, in our own land and our own time, the streets look different from 19th century London, but the season still has a way of pressing questions to the surface. The sanctuary lights glow. The Nativity scenes are polished. Choirs sing “For unto us a child is born,” and “Wonderful, counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” Gifts are passed, meals eaten, magic made.

In the Dickens classic, Scrooge was shown a true accounting of all of his choices: the fianceé he emotionally abandoned when the love of money overtook his heart. The employee with a sick child to whom he provided no assistance, a family he refused to interact with, and a ledger book full of the accounting of the poor who owed him money. “I can’t afford to make idle people merry,” Scrooge said, adding that if there were those who couldn’t make their own way in the world, they should die and “decrease the surplus population.”

In America, some leaders and public figures –– often those who co-opt the language of faith for political power and social clout –– will someday have to reckon with the chains they are forging, with the modern-day version of the workhouses of London. One Texas pastor encouraged his followers to “make Jesus smile” by using a gun to “pack foreigners into the back of a van to be kicked out of the country. That is a godly, glorious endeavor,” he said.

And it doesn’t stop with dehumanizing those who crossed the southern border illegally. It extends to anyone who happened to be born in a developing nation and to those who are Muslim. The highest-profile political leaders in the United States now advocate deporting everyone from third-world countries, regardless of status, lest “society collapse in the coming years.”

“They are poisoning the blood of our country,” is repeated from rally stages and into podcast microphones, clipped on social media and spread like a virus. “In some cases, they are not people… These are animals,” Americans are told.

Those sentences travel. They leave the spotlight and the studio and arrive, a few hours later, in the soft-lit places where people practice religion in the ordinary way: a church lobby with a fraying Christmas garland looped around the welcome desk, a folding table stocked with name tags and pens that never quite work, a Crock-Pot warming something beige for the after-service meal.

Someone stands with one thumb on their screen and one hand on a paper cup of coffee, scrolling a clip with captions turned on because the sanctuary is still full of lingering conversation, and then the clip gets forwarded into a small-group thread that also contains a link to the meal train for a woman who just had surgery and a reminder about the children’s pageant rehearsal.

On any given Sunday, that language has to pass by people who have already made a home in the church. A woman who grew up in Honduras sets out communion cups in a neat grid, her hands moving quickly because she has done this for years. A man who was born in Nigeria runs the slides for the worship songs, cuing up “Silent Night” for the congregation. A teenager whose parents came from El Salvador stands in the back with a stack of bulletins, glancing up every time the door opens.

They hear the same phrases as everyone else. They go home to the same texts and clips. They understand that some of the country’s most prominent voices speak about people like them as poison, as animals, as an invasion, as a surplus that needs to be reduced. It is one thing to hear those words on a rally stage. It is another to hear them in the voices of people who hug you during the passing of the peace.

Marley and the phantoms who visit Scrooge gave him a glimpse of what that kind of life adds up to. Scrooge was shown how businessmen treated his death as a scheduling problem and a chance at a free lunch. He witnessed strangers pawning his bedcurtains and blankets, proud of the bargain they had wrung from a corpse. He viewed a gravestone that carried his name, with no mourners gathered to pay their last respects.

Scrooge’s greatest horror is not that he glimpses his own death. It is that he realizes that everyone around him was relieved when he passed. In the same way, the words some American leaders and houses of worship choose about immigrants will shape the stories told about them later — by their own children, by the communities they inhabit, by the believers who decide whether their faith still has room for the stranger.

Scrooge woke up in his own bed with time left on the clock and a chance to do something different with his days. Faith communities have that same chance. They can keep adding links to the chain by repeating the phrases that make other people easier to discard, or they can pick up a different kind of language — one that treats every person as a human being of infinite worth, one that takes seriously the idea that “peace on earth, good will to men,” should control how we speak about the people who arrive at our door.

The chains we forge will not stay hidden forever. They become our reputation, our archive, our footage, our transcripts. One day, when the sermons are searched and the clips replayed and the next generation goes looking for what we really believed about our neighbors, some of us will be remembered by the weight of the chains we chose.

But it’s not too late. We can still, like Scrooge, have a change of heart.

According to Dickens, “Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. 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.”