Scrooge - where are you in the story?

I've blogged about Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol  several times before, because I continue to be fascinated by this story and the many adaptations it has inspired over the years.  It's also the only book by Dickens I have ever finished (being a great deal shorter than most of the others!).  It makes me wonder if I should read more Dickens...

When I was a sixth former I was in a school production of Nicholas Nickleby, and I will always remember what the drama teacher told us about Dickens' London.  You will all have seen beautiful 'chocolate box' productions, he said, which make it look very quaint and picturesque.  Make no mistake though, he went on, Dickens' London was a harsh place.  There were few choices for those facing money problems: the debtors' prison, the workhouse, or starvation on the streets.  Although Christian charity was a virtue prized by the Victorians, they distinguished (as Alfred Doolittle reminds us in Pygmalion) between the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor.  This was a time long before Jobseeker's Allowance, when people depended upon the pricked consciences of wealthy people, who presumably only gave to those they considered to be 'deserving'.  We only have to think back a couple of years to the rhetoric of 'strivers and skivers' to realise that, while we have the welfare state, attitudes towards those who need it have not changed all that much.

I suppose my question for today is: where are you in A Christmas Carol?  Most of us, reading or watching the story, are probably left feeling pretty good about ourselves; Scrooge is so very rich and so very nasty.   Most of us are probably pretty virtuous in comparison; we might identify with Scrooge's cheerfully generous nephew, Fred.  If we are struggling financially or otherwise going through a tough time, we might find the character of Bob Cratchit has more resonance.  But when I consider these words of Jesus I wonder how very different from Scrooge I am:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 

I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ 

 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 

 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 

When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ 

 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Matthew 25.35-40

Since starting the suspended meals scheme three years ago in the church coffee house, we have got to know quite a few homeless people pretty well.  We know their names, our managers know a little of their stories, as well as how each person takes their coffee.  I've always found it hard to walk past homeless people (although I usually dither about what to do, and sometimes don't do anything at all),  but now the discomfort I feel has reached fever pitch.  My husband and I were walking down the high street in Southend a few weeks ago and a woman was begging.  I made eye contact with her and smiled, but didn't give her anything, so she shouted something sarcastic in my direction.  We carried on walking and my sense of unease grew and grew.  I just wanted to shop, maybe have a coffee - I didn't want to deal with someone else's problems.  I didn't want to deal with that woman and her world, I just wanted to stay in my own, relatively safe one.  But passages from the Bible like the one above went round and round my head and, in the end, I said to my husband, I have to go back.  So we went back and I asked if I could get her a coffee.  She didn't want one, but we ended up having a conversation.  I'd felt annoyed that she had shouted at me, as well as guilty for not stopping earlier, but it became clear very quickly that she was pretty drunk.  That explained the shouting.  In the end, we parted friends, she making drunken jokes which didn't make much sense, but which we laughed at, and walked away smiling.  

Ann Morisy writes on Christian mission and she has some very interesting things to say about middle class people like me who start trying to engage with the poorest people in society.  She argues that when people leading relatively comfortable lives serve the poor, it is we who are transformed by the encounter.  Morisy seems to be saying that the wealthy need to give charity just as much as, or even more than, the poor need to receive it.  We need to be transformed by an encounter with the poor.  I am reminded of a line in The Blind Side, a wonderful film which tells the true story of homeless black teenager Michael Oher who is taken in by the wealthy white Tuohy family.  One of Leigh Ann Tuohy's friends gushes to her, saying "you're changing his life!".  "No," Leigh Anne replies, "he's changing mine."

That discomfort I feel every time I see someone begging is perhaps the effect of my comfortable world bumping up against someone else's very different world.  I cannot change their world to make it like mine - although Leigh Anne Tuohy and her family doubtless made Michael a lot more comfortable in his.  But perhaps what I can do is to look them in the eye, really see them, and perhaps hear part of their story.  And, in my experience, nine times out of ten someone begging on a cold street says yes to a cup of coffee.