Yet another year without the "Great Pumpkin!"
At the end of this month, yet another Halloween most likely will come and go — and still there will be no “Great Pumpkin” rising out of the pumpkin patch — although I intend to remain vigilant!
Funny how this holiday, once mostly the cherished domain of children and their desire to “become someone else,” even just for a night, has now become yet another venue for filling commercial coffers.
While my candy-scrounging and costume-wearing days are well behind me, in early October, I broke out my slightly scratched DVD of the Peanuts classic, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (and I’ll do the same in early December for A Charlie Brown Christmas).
A number of years ago, PBS aired a wonderful, but sobering documentary about the life of Charles Schulz, the creator and sole illustrator of the Peanuts cartoon strip. After learning more about the life of the talented but lonely Schulz, it became apparent to me that both Schulz’s life and the way it was so dramatically portrayed through his signature comic strip are testimonies to the struggle between hope and resignation, between knowing we are loved and desperately hoping we will be loved.
Even though the ending of It’s the Great Pumpkin is forever the same, and we are both bemused by Linus’ ill-fated devotion as well as sympathetic to his dashed dreams, it’s the unrefined struggle that keeps us coming back for a viewing. After all, what has made Peanuts so wildly popular for well over half a century is that the scars and blemishes by which each of us are tarnished (as well as those scars and blemishes we dish out) are never hidden or glossed over. Perhaps the fact that the Peanuts characters are children, and the television cartoon figures are voiced by children (Charles Schulz defiantly insisted to CBS that this be so — or else no show!) make the very adult struggles the characters engage more palatable. We are permitted to see ourselves as we are, rather than to be repulsed and frightened by our frequent human cruelty and indifference.
Linus is a testimony to the heart of the Christian message, in so far as he represents all of us who continue to dream, to believe, to hope, to await and prepare for, and to see what others fail to see behind the veil of our senses — surely qualities we espouse as Missionaries and Companions of the Precious Blood.
Fr. Ben Berinti, C.PP.S., Melbourne Beach, FL
Provincial Councilor