“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” (Dickens, A Christmas Carol) 

As we all know, Jacob Marley’s ghost visits Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve to warn him that the life he is leading is not a good one and that he has a very small window of opportunity to change it for the better. If he does not take it, Scrooge will be condemned to the same fate as Marley, carrying the heavy chains forged by his cold-hearted life, forever wandering the world, painfully wishing that he could intervene and help those in need. When Marley laments his own misused life, Scrooge attempts to comfort him by arguing that he was a great business partner. Marley responds,

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.” 

Here Marley explains that there is more to life than the strict business of satisfying our own self-interest by amassing great wealth, fame and power. A full human life is one that acknowledges the responsibilities we have to others. At the very least we have the responsibility to conduct our lives with honor and integrity in such a way that we provide an example to others on how they might want to lead their lives. 

One way to uphold this responsibility is to discover and acknowledge the heavy chain we have forged in our own lives “link by link.” Some of the links that make up our own chain are the false beliefs we have about ourselves that either we created or other people have created for us and now accept as true indicators of who we really are. Feeling grossly inadequate physically and psychologically, not deserving of love and kindness, or believing there is no way out of an unfulfilling job, are the beliefs that hold us back from starting new ventures and actively forming new relationships with others. They can also make us cold-hearted and cruel. This is what happened to Scrooge. As a small boy, he was left all alone at school over the holidays while his classmates, filled with holiday cheer, jumped onto carriages for home. This left him feeling unwanted and unworthy of love. He internalized these feelings and thought that they reflected who he really was. By doing this, he unconsciously planted the seeds of bitterness and anger in his heart that would eventually entangle and smother his compassion for others. We can see this in the mean-spiritiedness and cruelty he showed towards his nephew and Bob Cratchit. It also caused him to direct his love towards things that could not love him back or hurt him, namely, money.

What are the links in your chain? Have you accepted false beliefs about yourself without question or examination? Have you unintentionally planted destructive seeds in your own heart? You have a responsibility to yourself and others to answer these questions. Just as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future showed Scrooge how his life was, is, and will be, you should imaginatively move through your own life and see how things were, how they are, and how they will be. You don’t want to be like Marley and the ghosts he rejoined when he bid farewell to Scrooge.

“The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost…[m]any had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.”

Take the time now to be good to yourself and others. Don’t wait until it’s too late.

Marley’s Ghost by Philosophical Living is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.