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If there was enough space in the title bar above I would have named this piece the Bear, the German Shepherd, and the Lion.

It’s one hundred years ago this Christmas since Winnie the Pooh made his debut – Christmas Eve 1925.

There’s a lot of popular wisdom in this popular AA Milne classic.

As Pooh puts it powerfully: “Life is a journey to be experienced, not a problem to be solved.”

Eighty years later – Christmas Day 2005, Pope Benedict surprised the world with the intimacy and power of his first encyclical letter entitled God is Love.

In one of the most often quoted lines from Deus Caritas Est: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

I’d like to see Pooh Bear and Benedict in conversation. Using their words above as a starter I think they’d have a lot to chat about.

Add Pope Leo to the conversation with his first Christmas Midnight Mass homily this year, and the simplicity and down-to earth theme continues: “To find the Saviour, one must not gaze upward, but look below: the omnipotence of God shines forth in the powerlessness of a newborn.”

And all of that is worthy of repetition.

Life is a journey
to be experienced,
not a problem
to be solved.

Being Christian is not
the result of an ethical choice
or a lofty idea,
but the encounter with an event,
a person,
which gives life a new horizon
and a decisive direction.

To find the Saviour,
one must not gaze upward,
but look below:
the omnipotence of God
shines forth
in the powerlessness of a newborn.