MOUNTAIN VIEW: The chains that bind

The air was filled with phantoms. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.

—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

On frustrating days, toting objects from one place to another, receiving and sending armloads of paper that will get pitched out, or standing on the college hilltop to watch massive tons of tractor-trailer cargo booming by in either direction—logs this way, planks that; goods this way, garbage that way—I sometimes conclude that the life of man could be reduced to the function of transporting molecules from here to there.
After all, we’re made of molecules—of matter. Just walking down the block, we’re moving cargo—more than 100 pounds of dirt and water—from one place to another.
The amazing factor is that, unlike any other species we know of, humankind knows it’s walking around wearing mud. If we stop to consider it, we find ourselves in this humorous, bizarre position of being made of material and yet, somehow, able to stand apart and observe our own condition.
This crux is what Christians call incarnation. We’re spirits, incarnated—or fire infusing flesh. At times, feeling smothered by burdens and troubles, pain and worries, the condition feels less like incarnation than incarceration.
My classes just read “A Christmas Carol.” The original, hilarious and startling text is impossible to surpass as a universal example of how to turn burdens into lightness of being, trouble into happiness, captivity into freedom. Not in some other world, but this one.
Though I’d read the story many times, this was my first realization of how burdened and captive Mr. Scrooge was in the first scenes. He couldn’t take his eye off his poor, shivering clerk because Bob Cratchitt might stop working or sneak some coal for his faint fire. He clearly can’t let go his money, nor agree to attend his nephew’s party, nor let go his own foul mood for even a moment to smile at a stranger. As one student pointed out, Scrooge even treated himself as a poor captive, eating cheap gruel and lodging in gloomy quarters.
When Marley’s ghost shows up, even this phantom is burdened! He first appears not as a vapor, but a loud, ponderous clanking sound—the approaching, heavy sound of chains being dragged slowly up the stairs.
This fascinates me, since we usually think of death as a loss of molecules and burdens—not their acquisition! Some Christian denominations and—according to the late J. Vernon McGee—the most popular revivals, focus on the Rapture and the afterlife, as if this molecular one were merely something to endure and be got rid of as speedily as possible, so that we can all be free spirits. As McGee pointed out, nobody wants to discuss our responsibilities here.
But Dickens did. Marley was not boiling in hell nor floating away in a remote heaven; he was still walking the earth, dragging his acquired burden made—humorously—of lockboxes and keys and bolts and chains, images of the earthly permanence he’d sought to preserve his life with. Indeed, the wealth—the inert, metallic molecules he could have turned back into life for others—Marley retained. Now he dragged it about as penance. He wanted permanence and got it.
Even more strikingly, as Scrooge looks out the window at Marley’s exit, he sees the whole Christmas Eve sky filled with moaning ghosts carrying chains. Are they crying because of their own burdens? No!
“One old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below upon a doorstep.”
Amazingly, these ghosts are upset not at their own constriction, but because they can’t carry the burdens of people on earth. They’ve lost their opportunity because they’ve lost their material condition. No molecules=no freedom to carry other people’s molecules, or burdens.
The image of a “burden” is used cross-culturally to represent a problem, a “weight” upon the spirit, trouble. Clearly, in a society in which most of us no longer have to tote and chop firewood, when we heat the house by pushing a button and have water at the turn of a tap, our burdens are often composed more of anxieties—how to pay for that heat and tap water, house or business overhead, how to get everything done, how to keep up with ever-changing technologies and navigate torrents of information, how to keep a family healthy and sane in a stressful, toxic world.
Anxiety also creeps into politics (after all, a big business these days) and even into some religious leadership which, in America’s past two decades, has let itself be wed to government more stickily than Constantine himself could have accomplished. The effect has not been to bring a message of redemption and spiritual freedom into government, but to conscript the Christian church in particular into the service of supporting dubious and sometimes corrupt political ends.
This, in turn, weights down or turns off seekers who might find the Christian message appealing, were it not chained and bound to the lockboxes of politicians and consultants who make millions from forging these connections.
This conscription of the Christian message bothers me, particularly this time of year, as Isaiah foretells the coming of the Messiah as one who would “set the prisoner free.”  Jesus himself declared that his “burden was light.” He chastised the dogmatists, with all their rules and disdain of others, for “binding on men burdens too great to bear, while you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one finger.”
Dickens himself found odious the ponderous business and weightiness of religion, particularly when used to oppress and manipulate some people while allowing others to feel superior. Conversely, realizing that “mankind was my business” (not money, not dogma), and that he still had time to carry others’ burdens here, brought laughter and lightness even to old Scrooge.
A writer, educator and community activist, Liza Field lives in Wytheville. Contact her at .