Humanity Is Our Business
By Rev. Jeanne Randall-Bodman
“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob.”
“Business! cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
Ebenezer Scrooge meets Marley’s Ghost in MGM’s 1938 adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
I haven’t started watching them yet, but I have started strategizing which of my favorite Christmas movies I’ll watch with my sons while they are home for Thanksgiving, and which I will savor on my own. (They refuse to give “The Bishop’s Wife” a fair viewing and I refuse to let them yuck my yum, no matter how wooden Cary Grant is in that movie).
I may not have started rewatching these favorite Christmas movies yet, but they have started showing themselves to me. Certain scenes have joined the random lines from hymns and poems that pop into my mind un-summoned while I am walking, or working in the yard, or puttering about doing chores . Brief emissaries of light that offer themselves to me – stored away for just such a time as this by long repetition. I hope you know what I mean.
It’s a confusing time – the glorious autumn colors, the season of gratitude and Thanksgiving on the one hand and the drumbeat of doom to accompany the rise of fascism on the other. The volunteers of IMAC joyfully packing up food for hungry neighbors – and the federal administration refusing to access the SNAP contingency fund to feed hungry Americans.
As I was walking the dog the other day, trying not to let my fretfulness about the world magnify my annoyance at his over-exuberance, a scene from A Christmas Carol popped unbidden into my mind: Ebenezer Scrooge cowering in his dressing gown while Jacob Marley rattled the chains of an ill-spent life and bellowed: “Business?! Mankind was my business.”
In this season of beauty and fear, gratitude and anxiety, I am giving thanks for old movies and for simple home truths: humanity is our business; loving-kindness, mercy, forbearance, benevolence. I am taking courage and hope from the ways I see those lived out at Kairos.