In spite of his success and lionization, however, Dickens could never shake off the memories of his early years or ignore the plight of those less fortunate than he. (Sadly, this included his extended family, who were perpetually in his debt.) Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip, the fraught young protagonists of his best-known novels, hardly had to be conjured from his imagination.

Many writers will attest that inspiration, when it comes knocking at the door, thumps loudly and, once let in, can carry the writer beyond his usual powers and hours. This happened to Dickens toward the end of 1843. Depressed by his debts and the importunity of his profligate extended family, he needed what we would call a best-seller. To his delight, it knocked loudly at his door – a Christmas story.

A chronic night-walker – he often covered well over a dozen miles between dinner and sunrise – he strode for hours, almost overwhelmed by the images and scenes tumbling over each other, and as he later wrote, alternately laughing and crying. He got the manuscript to the printer (I have a photocopy of the script, and can only marvel that any typesetter, working by lamplight or the dim daylight of a London winter, possibly could make sense of it); it came out December 19; the first edition was sold out by Christmas Eve, five days later.

A Christmas Carol has been in print continuously since 1843 and reproduced in hundreds of stage and film productions. I suspect that Scrooge is a part that every aging actor yearns for a crack at. I’m pretty sure that the main reason for its longevity is that a bit if Scrooge resides in each of us. The competing urges to hoard selfishly what politicians call our hard-earned money and to share our bounty with the less fortunate among us create a dilemma at this time of year, when (as the fund-raiser in Scrooge’s office says) “Want is keenly felt and Abundance rejoices.”

We haven’t changed a bit in the 180 years since the story was published. Just the other day, a comment that I see fairly often on the internet popped up again. “I don’t mind my tax money going to help poor people,” the poster write, “but I have a real problem sending it to idle people.” The comment echoes the remark Scrooge makes to justify his penuriousness: “I don’t make merry myself at Christmastime, and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the prisons and the workhouses, and those who are badly off must go there.”

This year’s reading of A Christmas Carol, my 48th at my old home church, St. Thomas in Hanover, brought with it a revelation. Which is – we’ve all heard, dozens of times, the introduction to a piece of music, a sermon, a story that includes a reference to the sense of overwhelming darkness current in the world, and how this bit of brightness is meant as a counter to the temptation to despair. The mistake I’ve always made is sometimes to believe that anything can make those clouds roll away.

Nothing can, I finally realize. I remember once, in an argument with my father, who was a priest, asking how many souls he’d saved. He was nonplussed, which I then reckoned a victory. Now I see that his job was much more mundane – weddings, funerals, baptisms, and preaching, to be sure; but also mediating arguments between spouses, finding rent money and apartments for indigent parishioners, helping young men in their first jobs reckon the real costs of their new cars. Much more mundane, and much more important. At his funeral, I was quite moved when any of his people called him not “Father Bill,” but “Brother Bill.”

Whatever we do is probably not going to change the world. But the little bits that we do to make life a little easier for any of our fellow creatures – and I do include our furry companions – is far better than making it harder or more painful. It takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown; there’s probably a message in that fact. As the great, dark train of history rushes past, some people throw rocks or eggs at it. May we have the grace to wave cheerfully at all the people aboard.