In Defense of Sunbursts

While resting in my room after my father died, I felt soothed by contemplating two things: the clean, pale blue corners where the walls met the ceiling, and the tranquil Thomas Kinkade painting hung above my bed. I imagined myself into the dusk, watching the ducks on the canal, enjoying the cottage flowers, gazing upon the sky--pale blue like my bedroom walls, pale blue like my home sky when chimney swifts twittered from the ruins of the old high school next door to hunt insects in the evening. During that season of grief, images of quiet beauty reflected my sorrow over goodness lost, and also, somehow, provided an alternative to the bleakness or anger that sometimes shook my soul.

I wrestled to make sense of my world. I had thought it mostly good. The springtime frogs singing by the railroad tracks, the music-like motion of foals and mares in the neighbors' pasture, the boxed security of car rides in the dark with Mom and Dad murmuring to each other in the front seat while we kids rested in the back--these taught me to view the world through a mostly friendly lens. But walking through familiar fields after Dad died, I sometimes resented the beauty of hedgerows and roadsides. Life wasn't as good as it had seemed. It could be ugly. It could hurt. It could be blank as February cloud cover. I felt I had been deceived.

Today, hunting for stationary, I find two small books of Kinkade's paintings. I remember researching his vision and his critics for one of my college class papers. Though some critics dismissed his work as commercialized and his vision as cheaply sweet, I argued that an attempt to embody the greater goodness for which we long--even when that goodness cannot be fully realized on this earth--is a worthy artistic endeavor. Now, looking at the pictures again, I enjoy their vision of cozy tranquility. But I am not entirely easy in my enjoyment, especially when I turn to the back of the booklets where biographical notes proclaim Kinkade's love for his family and his commitment to his Lord. Jarringly counter to his pictures of domestic beauty, Kinkade's last years were far from his visions. He died from substance abuse, estranged from his wife and romantically involved with another woman.

After Dad's illness and death, I wondered how to figure the world out. Was it mostly good, or mostly bad? The question chafed inside me--I needed to understand. Oddly, relief didn't come for several years. Home on break from college, walking and reflecting on the odd mix of the ugly and the beautiful that even one day could hold, I realized that the point wasn't to measure the good things in my life to see if they outweighed the bad. Good wasn't made to offset evil. Instead, each good thing was a finger of light through the cloud cover--a messenger, a reminder of God, whose goodness floods heaven and touches the trembling earth.

These days, I feel more despairing about my broken self than about the cracks in the world at large. It is not hard to trust the existence of goodness (and Goodness). But how it relates to me through my personal cloud cover doesn't seem as clear. I read with wistfulness David's proclamations of hope for good even in this world: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life," and, "For you, O Lord, have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before the Lord in the land of the living."

Looking out my window toward the busy suburban traffic, I notice suddenly that the mums around a business sign resemble the mounds of color in a Kinkade painting. The sign, proclaiming Providence Bank, is warm with the peculiar light of midwestern late afternoons. Next to the corner with its tan sign and purple, scarlet, and golden mums, modern cars rush over prosaic asphalt. It is good to keep hedges and medians of wonder in spite of street fumes--to cultivate a quiet spot for listening, a willingness to take the hint that beyond all the grime of this world (and even my own soul) blazes more Goodness than I could ever comprehend. It reaches through--more often than I realize--turning mums and bank signs into whispers of glory and, even, comfort.