c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ Thanksgiving fits us humans well. That is what Norman Rockwell, the famous painter of Saturday Evening Post covers, understood.

He depicted the feast as a family gathering, of generations crowded around the table, each face a revelation of our condition _ the mischievous expectation of the children, the star-scattered eyes of young lovers, and the battle-ribbon age lines of the old.

We can be thankful this year for this artist, whose”popularity,”as critic Michael Kimmelman observed in the New York Times,”guaranteed contempt from the art world, which, for more than half a century, despised Rockwell as a cornball sentimentalist.” Now, however, a major show of his works has been mounted that, after touring the country, will close at Manhattan’s Guggenheim museum in 2001. He is being taken seriously, we note, because he took us seriously and, as Kimmelman said, endowed our everyday doings with a”self-effacing dignity that helped … ease the country’s passage into the future.” Modernists thought that he did not make us suffer enough to understand him. Yet, as in his famous Thanksgiving painting, and in his wartime evocation of the most common and profound of our experiences _ of a family seeing a serviceman off at the train station, for example _ he allowed us to see what finally counts between people.

Beyond that, Rockwell opened for us the moments in which we so painfully and yet gloriously sense our need for one another _ leaving home and returning there, changed by the interim and yet the same.

Social commentators and reformers have wondered why the cars in our traffic jams carry only one person and why you cannot bribe Americans into joining car pools. Even the special high-speed lanes created for those sharing a ride are being abandoned.

Perhaps commuters carry a vestigial sense of what Norman Rockwell grasped _ that every leave-taking involves us in the heroic mythological journey, that abiding theme in which heroes must leave home and enter a strange land to slay the dragon of ignorance before they can return again.

Commuters do the same thing in the cycle of leaving the shelter of home to face the challenges of the world that will ennoble and perhaps wound them before they can return again, changed and yet the same.

Commuters seem unlikely mythic figures _ wearing earphones, sipping coffee, combing their hair, thinking wild thoughts _ and yet, unwittingly, they are protecting the sacredness of that journey, feeling, even if only remotely, that this day ahead is the test of who they are, what their character is like, and whether they save their souls that day or not. The journey is not, therefore, of small consequence.

Nor is the return to our home, whether we are executives or poets, students or statesmen.

For we are either enlarged or diminished, we have made ourselves greater or less by how we entered what seemed to be a portal of time, but which confronted us, as every day does, with a spiritual dilemma instead.

We may be grateful this Thanksgiving that Rockwell caught such telling human incidents in his work, for these address that deep part of ourselves _ our intra-net _ in which we can still recognize our human possibilities and the tests we face in our work every day.

If we give ourselves to it, we have something to take home in the evening. If we do not, the same journey waits for us, with its opportunities for gain or loss, the next morning. We are commuters of the human and, as our one car/one person traffic strangely reminds us, we must make this trip for and by ourselves. No wonder we are glad to get home.

That, of course, is why the days of Thanksgiving are the setting for the year’s heaviest travel. These journeys are not for business but for our homecoming, even if it is only across town, to see and be with those we love.

It is, we might say, the celebration of our relationships, the tribute to the place and people from whom we separated ourselves to test our own spirits and to which we return, the same, yes, and yet greatly changed.

Thanksgiving, as Rockwell understood, is a feast of everything human about us. It is a religious mystery of our origins and demands a time apart in which to draw strength from them again.

What a homely and yet spiritually rich few days. How else could we celebrate them except, as at an altar, around a table with food and room enough for all?

IR END KENNEDY