As we approach the glorious holiday of Christmas, let us contemplate truth concerning inner peace. While we all yearn for this desirable state of existence, in reality, few of us actually achieve a lasting peace in our lives. Instead, most of us are riding upon the wheel of fortune. This useful concept, emanating from medieval times, illustrates that when we have not achieved a true centering in our lives, we spin on the perimeter of the wheel, out of control, along for the ride and at the mercy of life's continuous bombardment of perpetual up-and-down cycles. Ironically, it seems the more we try to exact control in an attempt to take charge of our life circumstances, the less we are able to migrate to that peaceful midpoint.
Dickens' holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, perfectly illustrates that point. Infamous main character Ebenezer Scrooge honestly believed he was in total control of his life. Despite the repeated Christmas Eve challenges to his peace by Bob Cratchit, his nephew Fred, and the charitable solicitors concerning his strict, cold, unfeeling views of the holiday, his relationship to family, and his responsibility to the welfare of unfortunate others, he held fast to his narrow world-view. Unswayed, he remained "at peace" with himself. In fact, Scrooge had lost genuine control of his life decades earlier. This occurred during his childhood. Rarely is this little known fact revealed in movie and play adaptations of the story. Charles Dickens, however, makes this fact abundantly clear during Scrooge's "dark night of the soul" visitation by the Ghost of Christmas Past.
The very first place to which Scrooge is transported was his childhood boarding school. There, he viewed a youthful image of himself, bent over a book, pitifully alone and isolated on Christmas Day; there is absolutely no one else at the cold, dark, "vast" institution. His father refused to allow him to come home for the holiday. While not explicitly stated, the strong implication for this abandonment is the father's deep disappointment in young Ebenezer's love of fanciful literature. This was not appropriate behavior for a boy who was to become a hard-driving businessman at the dawn of the industrial age. There could be no room in his life for this romantic nonsense. Apparently, through cold and punishing abandonment, his father intended to rip this "fluff" from his mental makeup.
Immediately upon viewing this sad image, old Scrooge began to grieve for his "former self"; he cried twice during the visitation. During this scene, he remembered his deep love of fantasy literature, and the comfort it gave him during this period of familial abandonment. He even began to expound enthusiastically and at great length about Ali Baba and his companions, who actually visibly manifested before young Scrooge's eyes during this time. Dickens stated that Scrooge's contemporary business associates would have been dumbfounded to hear him speak in such a way.
I am not sure how Charles Dickens had the wisdom to know that genuine inner peace begins with therapeutic remembering and grieving. A Christmas Carol was written in 1843, decades before Freud began his seminal writings about psychological cure. Dickens himself never was able to extricate his own life from the traumatic childhood abandonment he experienced during his own youth. At the end of his life, he wrote that despite his huge success as a writer, and despite being surrounded by a loving family, he often drifted back to his unresolved childhood issues, still haunted by the indelible scars they left upon his psyche, still controlled by their dysfunctional control upon his adult life.
Despite this, he has left us a gift for all time. If Scrooge, as cold and as mean-hearted as he was, could complete the difficult psychospiritual process ultimately leading to true inner peace, then we all have the ability to confront and make peace with our own idiosyncratic shadow-Scrooges within. After his initial remembering and grieving, Scrooge had relatively little trouble understanding the long term effects this unresolved abandonment left upon him from that point forward in his life.
He began to understand that due to this early trauma, he had lived his life based in fear. He learned that making (and clutching) piles of money was his fearful defense to ward off any further attempts to displace him. He learned that keeping people at a distance through unfeeling, aggressive behavior was his fearful defense to insure that they would never again abandon and hurt him again.
Ultimately, he learned that true inner peace is obtained
only after letting go of control. When he finally stopped repressing his
past, he opened the way to a heart-centered life. By fully facing his own
woundedness and by grieving it, he finally was able to open up in compassion
to the woundedness of others. He became a second father to the physically
wounded Tiny Tim. And he profoundly realized the message of the wounded
Christ's death on the cross. In the presence of his own corpse, Scrooge
understood that only through an "open, generous, and true" hand,
and only through a "brave, warm, and tender heart can good deeds spring
from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal." Essentially,
he let go-- and let the peace of Christ- consciousness direct his life.
Scrooge completed the seven difficult, Dickensian steps to spiritual transformation
embedded in A Christmas Carol, which led to the finding of his true center,
his true self, and his inner peace. Immediately, he lost his need to control
his environment and to control others. He became a 19th century, English
bodhisattva: one who had awakened, and who made the conscious decision to
joyfully participate with others in the ongoing problems of life. No longer
can we think of him in infamy; he is a psychospritual hero, one we should
emulate.
Authentic inner peace does not come easily. At this darkest time of the calendar year, just before the return of the light to the world, make the commitment to give yourself the greatest gift possible--the gift of shedding light on your personal past in service to remembering and grieving all unresolved issues. Before long, like Scrooge, you will begin to move toward your center-- your stillpoint of peace. No longer will you be a servant to the whims of life's unceasing wheel of fortune. Ultimately, you too will be resurrected and reborn-- right here and right now.
Joseph D. Cusumano, Ph.D., counselor and author of the book Transforming Scrooge: Dickens' Blueprint for Spiritual Awakening. Missouri (314) 838-4842.
E-mail: qjff08a@prodigy.com