I guess I'm sort of picking up where I left off with yesterday's post. Yesterday, I wrote about death. Scrooge changes as a result of his walks with the Ghosts of Christmas. Of all the ghosts, the Ghost of the Future is the most terrifying to him. Rightfully so. A sort of black shrouded specter of death, the Ghost conducts him to some pretty unsettling scenes and places, including Scrooge's grave. I know I wouldn't want to party with this particular phantom.
Of course, Scrooge's fear touches upon a primal fear in all of us: fear of the future. None of us knows when we're going to die. In fact, none of us knows what's going to happen tomorrow or tonight or in the next five minutes. The future doesn't speak. That's the fear Charles Dickens is playing with in this portion of the book.
I can tell you that the future is something that usually fills me with dread. I spend a lot of my waking hours worrying about the future. I worry about having enough money to pay my mortgage. I worry about having enough money to pay for the utilities. I worry about outgrowing our small house in a few years, when my son gets too old to share a room with my daughter. I worry about strange noises in my car that may indicate mechanical issues. I worry about what I'm going to have for dinner tomorrow night. I worry about losing my jobs. I worry about Hostess going bankrupt, and Twinkies going the way of the woolly mammoth.
That's a lot of worries, some of them legitimate (the mortgage payment) and some of them ridiculous (Twinkies have the half-life of uranium). It's a terrible thing to have the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come always looming over my shoulder. If I had a little more faith, I wouldn't spend as much time worrying about possible catastrophes. Faith would give me confidence. Faith should let me feel safe, sure of the future.
That's what Scrooge gains by the end of A Christmas Carol. Faith. He wants to change his future for the better. He knows what he has to do. The future is not something he fears anymore. It's something he embraces because he sees it filled with the possibility for good. He has faith in that.
I, on the other hand, envision a future filled with the possibility of sadness and strife. I spend my time planning to avoid this future. Of course, these plans are my way of trying to control things, which is absolutely idiotic. I can't control the future. Nobody can. Not Scrooge. Not Charles Dickens. Not me, no matter how hard I try. I know this fact.
However, Saint Marty likes the illusion of control.
Confessions of Saint Marty
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