Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be – Brantford Expositor

In Norman Rockwells paintings, life was picture perfect too perfect.

But when the iconic artist began to treat the last part of his career as a blank canvas, it generated both hate and hope.

Born in Manhattan, Rockwell dropped out of high school, went to art college, and soon began 45 years with the Saturday Evening Post magazine.

Like Frank Capras movies (A Wonderful Life), he painted life as people wanted to see it: homey and wholesome, wry and whimsical, and above all patriotic and at peace.

His most famous subjects included lovestruck teenagers gazing at the moon, a cop at a lunch counter with a runaway boy, a lion looking balefully at a zookeepers sandwich and a family sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner.

Critics sniffed at Rockwells work, calling it sugary sweet and overly sentimental, sanitized and safe. Rockwellesque came to mean anything out of touch with reality, and writers said the artist had immense talent but put it to banal use.

But when Rockwells second wife, Mary, died in 1959, the artist joined a weekly mens club that discussed the issues roiling America: the arms race, race relations, womens rights and counter-culture. Life was changing, and so was the artist.

Banned for years from showing minorities in his art, Rockwell painted The Golden Rule in 1961, with people of different races and religions under the caption Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You.

But that was just a warm-up.

In 1964, Rockwell stunned everyone with The Problem We All Live With, a painting for his new employer, Look magazine. It depicted four U.S. marshals escorting, past a howling mob, six-year-old Ruby Bridges into a newly desegregated school in New Orleans.

You dont see that mob, or the faces of the police. The focus is on Ruby, walking bravely past a wall spattered with a thrown tomato and grim racist graffiti.

Hate mail poured in, for the first time in Rockwells life. But there was praise, too.

Thank you for showing this white Southerner how ridiculous he looks, wrote one man.

A former critic wrote, Permit me to choke on my words. YOU have just said in one painting what people cannot say in a lifetime.

In his thank you letter, Rockwell replied, I just had my 70th birthday and am trying to be a bit more adult in my work.

When some pleaded for the sweet pictures of old, Rockwell was firm.

You cant make the good old days come back, just by painting pictures of them, he said. That kind of stuff is dead now and I think its about time.

Rockwell went on to paintMurder in Mississippi, depictingthe 1964 killing by the Klan and police of three civil rights workers two white and one black.

He also didNew Kids in the Neighborhood, showingblack and white kids sizing each other up near a moving van as a white woman peers from a window with near-hostility.

Sidelined by dementia, Rockwell died in 1978 at 84, amid a whole new respect for his art. In 2011, his painting was displayed in the White House when Ruby Bridges met with Americas first black president, Barack Obama.

Ive had my own Rockwellian struggle. Over the years, this column has been criticized, rightfully, as trite and superficial. Not everybody likes my style or approach, and Im OK with that.

I do try to connect faith with real life, with varying degrees of success, but theres a bigger issue. And that is that each of us is an artist, painting a daily picture of life and faith.

I fear too many of us are stuck in an early-Rockwell mindset.

Among Christians, I often hear a hankering for the good ole days. Many see the 1950s and 60s as a simpler, more religious, more mannered and respectful time, free of todays messy issues.

And, in many ways, they were. But only if you were white, middle class, straight, and part of the normal majority. For anybody else, those decades were fraught with bigotry, discrimination, and exclusion, if not outright fear and danger.

Even faith was largely about tradition, appearances, and fitting in. Its not that the old days were less troubled. The hard issues were simply ignored, repressed, or beaten into submission.

And, usually, the church was in on it.

But if anything is obvious about Jesus, its His heart for the poor and oppressed (even those whose conduct He didnt endorse), and His insistence that we get down in the messiness to lift the hurting and excluded.

Each of us needs to take a stand and paint our own version of The Problem We All Live With. That problem is not just racism, but sin in general: anything that stops us from loving God and each other as we should.

Finding a Jesus response to the different or difficult people around us is tiring and unsettling. It makes us confront what we believe, it challenge our assumptions, and it forces us to see that faith is not about nostalgia and escapism, but about meeting people where they are and helping them with todays gritty realities.

That will take humility and love that gets us off our duffs. But if we refuse to engage, pining for the past and sending the message that todays world is beyond redemption, faith will become even more irrelevant because of its perceived disconnect with reality.

Dont long for the good old day, for this is not wise, says Ecclesiastes 7:10. Thats because we look back with selective memories and paint only the pictures we want.

Instead, look around and ahead, commit to making a difference in your own circle, and use your faith to create a more loving and inclusive life, filled with the bold strokes and courageous colours found in Christ.

Share your thoughts with Rick Gamble at info@followers.ca He pastors an independent, nondenominational church in Brantford called Followers of Christ (www.followers.ca) and teaches media at Laurier Brantford.

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Nostalgia isn't what it used to be - Brantford Expositor