Here again is a painting Pissaro created while looking out the window of his studio (a converted barn) at Eragny, France. Pissarro loved painting winter landscapes. Here his fascination is with the effect of the winter sun on snow. One museum web page describes the snow colors as pearly pink and ice blue.
While looking out the window. How how do I see things? Does the Gospel of Jesus Christ enable me to see people and life differently? Or do I see as everyone else: like the people in a sitcom, a TV commercial or game show? Or like some people in government and Church who clearly have something else going on inside them, but without a spiritual/human ground.
Sales having fallen off, Camille Pissarro was again struggling financially in the late 1800's. We might wonder if his money problems helped him to identify with the struggles of the peasant class.
"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other," Mother Teresa of Calcutta said. But Pissarro doesn't forget: again, he includes a human presence. A peasant woman wearing heavy shoes and head scarf, has her back to us as she walks towards the wooded lot. Her arms are taut with the weight of the buckets. She walks in a ray of blue light. "Every human person is endowed with a dignity that must never be lessened, impaired or destroyed but must instead be respected and safeguarded, if peace is really to be built upon," Pope John Paul II said at the United Nations General Assembly in October of 1979.
Do we really understand these words? Or do we understand them and yet reject them?
Next month marks the 80th anniversary of the German oceanliner, St. Louis, carrying over 900 refugee-seeking German Jews, being turned away from Cuba and the United States. Three months earlier a bill died in Congress that propoesed to take in 20,000 Jewish children fleeing Hitler's new Germany. "There isn't a crisis of faith, but a crisis of love," the priest said of our time. But maybe that's true of all times.
Next month marks the 80th anniversary of the German oceanliner, St. Louis, carrying over 900 refugee-seeking German Jews, being turned away from Cuba and the United States. Three months earlier a bill died in Congress that propoesed to take in 20,000 Jewish children fleeing Hitler's new Germany. "There isn't a crisis of faith, but a crisis of love," the priest said of our time. But maybe that's true of all times.
