As I looked up and down the family’s Thanksgiving dinner table yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t help thinking of Norman Rockwell’s painting, “Freedom from Want,” one of 321 posters he painted for the Saturday Evening Post, which he aptly described as, ”the greatest show window in America.” It was his sensitive soul and brush that contributed mightily to the greatness of that show window.

Our table strikingly resembled Rockwell’s painting, in the gravity of the mother’s gingerly placing the platter of turkey on the table, with her husband’s memory standing protectively and proudly behind her, for she is a widow. The young people are attentive to an amusing story, and laughter bubbles up from the youngest child to the gray-haired grandmother. While wine glasses are missing from Rockwell’s painting, the best china graces the table, along with the serving dishes, and salt and pepper shakers.

From the site, www.americanillustration.org, we hear Rockwell’s commenting that he was ever seeking new ideas and new faces in his daily life. He wrote that everything he had ever seen or done had gone into his pictures. He painted not only the scenes and people close to him but, in a quest for authenticity, he would approach total strangers and ask them to sit for him. His internal art of “storytelling” became integrated with his external skills as an artist.

In 1962, Rockwell was quoted in Esquire magazine as saying: “I call myself an illustrator but I am not an illustrator. Instead I paint storytelling pictures which are quite popular but unfashionable.” On the contrary, the magazine writer tells us that Rockwell’s works were in fact very popular, but he was extremely sensitive to the way the art world, as well as the public, judged him.

Rockwell assessed his work with these words:

No man with a conscience can just bat out illustrations. He’s got to put all of his talent, all of his feeling into them. If illustration is not considered art, then that is something that we have brought upon ourselves by not considering ourselves artists. I believe that we should say, “I am not just an illustrator. I am an artist.”

It is Rockwell’s appreciation of his trade and his love and respect for the ordinary people that have prompted both the little and the powerful to appreciate his genius in capturing the American soul of his time.

But what of the American soul of our time? In his excellent book, What is the Point of Being a Christian? Father Timothy Radcliffe, OP., tells us of how his optimism in the 1960's has been lost, and quotes Oliver Bennett of Warwick University, arguing in Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World that, despite an explosion of wealth in many Western countries, we are suffering from a collective depression. He goes on to say:

There is growing violence in our cities, the development of gang warfare, escalation of drugs and, in the wider world, increasing inequality between the rich and poor, the spread of AIDS, the threat of ecological disaster and, above all, clashes between religions and the spread of terrorism.

Yet, we cannot give way to despair. What is needed is to look evil in the eye with courage and determination, owning what is our vineyard of the Kingdom, to be tilled and cared for by us this day in Christ’s presence, and with His grace, not rushing off to a different patch because it looks easier, or is less threatening, refusing to cut and run. Rowan Williams wrote these words of comfort: “The light is at the heart of the dark, the dawn breaks when we have entered fully into the night.” (Open to Judgment, London 1994, p.100)

Radcliffe gives us the encouraging story of having gone to Burundi during the renewal of the ethnic conflicts between Hutus and Tutsis, which crucify that beautiful country. His purpose was to visit the Dominican nuns in the north.

Six of the nuns were Tutsi and six Hutu, and they were able to live together in peace and love. When Radcliffe asked how they managed such a feat, they replied that, besides their common prayer, they always listened to the news together so that they could share all that happened. No one should be alone in her grief. Slowly, people from all the ethnic groups learned that the monastery grounds were a safe place, and gathered in their church to pray and grew their crops beside it. It was a green place in a burnt land – and a sign of hope.

Simple. No special degrees. No Cardinals, nor UN officials, nor ambassadors from ten countries. Just love. The kind of love Rockwell could have painted for a cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Can’t you just see it?

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