When the old man speaks
Balaam spoke, “Here’s the utterance of a man whose eyes are true, and one who hears what God says. Here’s the utterance of one who knows what the Most High knows, and who sees what the Almighty sees, enraptured and with eyes unveiled! I see him, though not know. I behold him, though not near.”
– From Numbers 24
Does Balaam know what he’s talking about? He sounds over-confident, almost like like a fool. And as we know, those are often the folks God speaks through to communicate with us, those of us supposedly so wise, we who do not want to look dumb or sound silly.
Sly Charles Dickens sprinkled bits of wisdom in the mouths of his most foolish characters. Some of the best were his old folks. This year I’m reading the fifth and last of Dickens’ Christmas Books, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain.
“What is that the old man has in his arms?” asked Mr. Redlaw (Mr. Redlaw is the haunted man), as he sat down to his solitary meal.
 “Holly, sir,” replied the quiet voice of Milly …
“Another Christmas come, said Mr. Redlaw. “Another year gone! More figures in the lengthening sum of recollection that we work and work at to our torment, till Death idly jumbles all together, and rubs all out. So, Philip!” breaking off, and raising his voice as he addressed the old man …
 “My duty to you, sir,” returned the old man. “Should have spoke before, sir, but know your ways, Mr. Redlaw – proud to say – and wait till spoke to! Merry Christmas, sir, and Happy New Year, and many of ’em. Have had a pretty many of ’em myself – ha, ha! – and may take the liberty of wishing ’em. I’m eighty-seven!”
 “Have you had so many that were merry and happy?” asked the other.
 “Ay, sir, ever so many,” returned the old man.
 “Is his memory impaired with age? It is to be expected now,” said Mr. Redlaw … he pushed his plate away, and, rising from the table, walked across the room to where the old man stood looking at a little sprig of holly in his hand …
“Merry and happy, old man?”
Surely not! Not so many decades after birth, so much suffering, so much pain … but Philip remembers the holly berries, not the suffering:
 “Maybe as high as that, no higher,” said the old man, holding out his hand a little way above the level of his knee, and looking retrospectively at his questioner, “when I first remember ’em! Cold, sunshiny day it was, out a-walking, when some one – it was my mother as sure as you stand there, though I don’t know what her blessed face was like, for she took ill and died that Christmas-time – told me they were food for birds. The pretty little fellow thought – that’s me, you understand – that birds’ eyes were so bright, perhaps, because the berries that they lived on in the winter were so bright. I recollect that. And I’m eighty-seven!”
 “Merry and happy!” mused the other, bending his dark eyes upon the stooping figure, with a smile of compassion. “Merry and happy – and remember well?”
 Remembering not just his mother and her holly, but also his wife, and their children. O, the stories he could tell!
 “Ay, ay, ay!” resumed the old man …“His mother and I have sat among ’em all, boys and girls, little children and babies, many a year, when the berries like these were not shining half so bright all round us as their bright faces. Many of ’em are gone; she’s gone; and my son George is fallen very low: but I can see them, when I look here, alive and healthy, as they used to be in those days; and I can see even George, thank God, in his innocence. It’s a blessed thing to me, at eighty-seven.”
  Old Philip’s quiet, joyful memories might not have been. But each year, whatever bitter tastes might have soured in his mouth over months past, he was given a cleansing task:
 “It was quite a pleasure to know that one of our founders … left in his will, among the other bequests he made us, so much to buy holly, for garnishing the walls and windows, come Christmas. There was something homely and friendly in it … Going round the building every year, as I’m a doing now, and freshening up the bare rooms with these branches and berries, freshens up my bare old brain.”
Balaam saw the birth of Jesus across the centuries – not now, but soon and very soon. Philip looked back the other way:
“One year brings back another, and that year another … At last, it seems to me as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I have ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted in – and they’re a pretty many, for I’m eighty-seven!”
 “Merry and happy,” murmured Redlaw to himself.
 The room began to darken strangely.
As in A Christmas Carol, the solitary soul of Dickens’ story must reckon with his own live’s sour and even bitter dregs. But, Dickens insists, “You can be merry and happy!” As author and character live together night and day during the weeks before the Christmas publishing deadline, they must have been drawn together into desperation and despair, but then drawn out again. God is good, and “merry and happy” rises up at last to stay, to endure, even to lend (in another book) to Tiny Tim his undying words:
“God bless us, every one!”
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All your ever-loving children, Lord, the good ones and the bad, the lovely and the lost, in all the times forever now and then, they have belonged and do belong to you. Always your blessing fills our minds and mouths with gift and joy and peace. Let us receive, O Lord, what you have always offered, and always will.
Charles Dickens, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas Time, from Chapter 1: “The Gift Bestowed.”
https://www.davesandel.net/category/advent-and-christmas-devotions-2019/
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archive.php?year=2019
