Let Others Lift You Up

Some say it’s good to be queen, and in the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Lucy is dismayed to learn she can’t be queen when she grows up. You have to be born one. “If I can’t be a queen,” she says, then “I’ll work and work until I’m very rich and then I will buy myself a queendom.” Good grief! Wrong on both counts. Queen saints became saints by doing

Charlie Brown: Tragedies and Trials

Charlie Brown, the central character in Charles Schultz' long-running cartoon "Peanuts."

Certainly, there’s no doubt you recall Charles Schultz‘s Peanuts cartoon character Charlie Brown. The series namesake was, of course Charlie Brown, who – as were all the characters – was perhaps aged 10, or 12 years. That’s a phenomenally formative time in our lives.

As children are wont to do, they imitate adults, particularly their parents. Perhaps emulate might be a better word? For with emulation there is a desire to be like, or in some sense exceed a person, and their character, whereas with imitation, there is not necessarily a sense of desire. It is merely a state of being, or of existence.

Nevertheless, as with all cartoons – and indeed, life – there were certain repetitive events. Nearing Halloween, for example, the readers could look forward to “The Great Pumpkin,” a fictitious imaginary character within the strip whose exclusive existence was in the fertile imagination of Charles Schultz. Though throughout the years he drew the characters in various stages of attempted discovery, readers never saw even the slightest hint of the elusive “Great Pumpkin.”

Similarly, readers were witness to