For the past couple of weeks I’ve been preparing for a speaking engagement I have in Newcastle this weekend. A businessman there is bringing the staff of his two companies together for a two-day retreat, and he’s asked me to bring something ‘inspirational and motivational’ to the black-tie dinner he’s holding on Saturday night. I’ve actually decided to pull a swifty on them. Since the dinner’s going to be a swanky formal affair, I thought I’d give the title of my talk as something like ‘Life lessons from the great intellectuals’. After introducing my speech as being 40 minutes on what history’s philosophers have to say about the art of life, I’ll then pounce. Because my heroes wont be Churchill, Plato or Socrates, but Lisa Simpson, Dr Suess and Charlie Brown!

I mean, think about Peanuts—the cartoon strip that lasted 50 years and gave us the exploits of Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Sally, PigPen, Peppermint Patty, a little black and white Beagle who thinks he’s a fighter pilot, and ‘good ol’ Charlie Brown—the confused little boy who lies in bed at night pondering life’s meaning. There’s plenty of life lessons there.

In one comic strip Charlie is lying in bed, and he says:

‘Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong” Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night.”’

In another strip Lucy says:

‘Charlie Brown, life is like a deck chair on a cruise ship. Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun. Some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they've been. Other people face their chairs forward - they want to see where they're going. On the cruise ship of life, which way is your deck chair facing?’

Charlie replies, ‘I've never been able to get one unfolded.’

One very telling Peanuts strip has little Sally playing in the backyard when all of a sudden she bursts into tears.

‘Why are you crying, Sally?’ Linus anxiously asks.

‘I don’t know,’ she replies. ‘I was jumping rope… everything was all right when… I don’t know… suddenly it all seemed so futile!’

Very poignant. Ever had the experience? For most of us a time will come when, like Sally, skipping through life, we’re forced to ask what it’s all about. Perhaps it’ll come for us like Charlie: lying in bed awaiting sleep, in the darkness and quietness when all of life’s distractions settle. In that darkness we hear a question: So what? So what about the new car, the new clothes, the promotion, the holiday. Is this all there is to life?

Well, that often leads to the question of religion. And Charlie Brown knew how thrilled we were about that topic:

Lucy is playing with a skipping rope in one cartoon, when younger brother Linus asks: Do you ever pray?

‘That’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it?’ Lucy snaps back. ‘Are you trying to start an argument? I suppose you think you’re somebody pretty smart, don’t you?’

Linus turns to Charlie Brown. ‘You’re right,’ he says, ‘religion is a very touchy subject.’

And why is that? Perhaps it’s because we’ve had bad experiences:

Sally and Linus are walking to school. ‘I would have made a good evangelist,’ Sally says. ‘You know that kid who sits behind me at school? I convinced him that my religion is better than his religion.’

‘How'd you do that?’ Linus asks.

‘I hit him with my lunch box.’

And so, when it comes to spiritual matters it’s not uncommon for us Aussies to ‘do a Linus’. Remember his great phrase?:

‘No problem is so big or so complicated that it can't be run away from!’

Charlie Brown says, ‘What if everyone was like you? What if we all ran away from our problems? Huh? What then? What if everyone in the whole world suddenly decided to run away from his problems?’

‘Well,’ Linus replies, ‘at least we'd all be running in the same direction.’

Unlike The Simpsons, you wont find much politics in Peanuts cartoons. Unlike Dr Suess, you wont find cute rhymes about cats in hats. Instead, Charlie Brown wont let us run away from the big questions of life: What’s gone wrong with the world? Where are my deck chairs placed? Who am I? What am I here for? Is there a God? Is this life all there is, or is there something beyond?

Who said cartoons are just for kids? Then again, maybe we’re much more open to those questions before the cynicism of adulthood comes.

Christmas is a great season but, boy, I tend to lose focus around this time each year. Am I alone in that? All the staff Christmas parties, running around looking for those final pressies for the hardest-to-buy-for members of the family… Sometimes I stop, look around at it all and say, I wonder what Jesus makes of this worldwide holiday we have in his name?

I had my eyes opened to the larger significance of Christmas a few years back from an unexpected source—it was during an interview with Bryce Courtenay.

Well known for books like The Power of One, The Potato Factory, April Fools Day and all the rest, we were talking about his latest book at the time, Matthew Flinder’s Cat. In that book Bryce tells the story of a one-time hot-shot lawyer who ends up homeless and living in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens addicted to alcohol. As I read the book I was astounded at the detail he uncovered about street life, organised crime and the plight of the homeless. So when I got Bryce on air I had to ask him—how did a wealthy author like him understand so much about addiction and homelessness? Bryce’s answer was inspirational. It turned out that his original method of approaching homeless people directly for interviews proved futile—the streeties were too shy and suspicious to share anything of themselves. So, Bryce decided to get his hands dirty and taste homeless life for himself.

He started by spending nights sleeping on the park benches in the Botanic Gardens. In the morning he’d line up with his fellow street dwellers for a feed from the charity food vans. He took sessions at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic and spent nights at St Vincent’s casualty ward to see how the homeless were treated when they hurt themselves. Bryce befriended the mentally ill and discovered just how abused those living on the street could become. (For instance, at the mercy of groups of heartless, club-hopping youths, it’s not unheard of for a homeless person to be set alight in some back alleyway as they lie sleeping.) Bryce even spent a night in the Salvation Army’s ‘drunk tank’—a secure cell where inebriated folks at risk of harming themselves are brought to sleep off their binges. During this research phase Bryce told me he got home at 4am each morning, exhausted and weeping from his experiences.

As I listened to Bryce’s gruelling research methods I realised I was beginning to grasp one of those profound mysteries about God—the Incarnation. To talk about the problem of alcoholism, Bryce Courtenay didn’t just read manuals on addictive behaviours or observe the plight of the inebriated from a distance—he entered the world of an alcoholic. In a similar but even greater act, to address a broken, decaying, rebellion-riddled globe God Himself entered our world in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. In the most breath-taking event of history, Jesus let go of His heavenly comfort to become our servant, He left His world to enter ours, gave up His riches to experience our poverty, and sacrificed His life to offer us escape from eternal death.

Whenever I lose sight of what Christmas is all about I remember Bryce Courtenay sleeping in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens. It makes me see the babe born in that manager in an entirely different light.