We had dinner with friends last night. In addition to good company, excellent food, lively conversation, and storytelling, it was an opportunity to appreciate again my wife’s ability to connect with people through the photographs and artwork they display in their home. I had visited these friends’ home before, but it was Susan’s first visit. Within minutes of our arrival, she was being led from picture to picture in their home, hearing the stories behind the prints, photographs, and paintings. It was a fascinating tour that included stories of their lives, places they had lived, their children and grandchildren, and their likes and dislikes. After our short tour of the house, I felt like I knew and understood them much better than I had before.

In their bedroom is a painting they purchased when they lived in Japan. They have a daughter who was adopted in those years. Later, after returning to their home in the United States, their daughter and son played with a ball indoors. The ball went astray and struck the painting. Some time afterward, they discovered a shop in Seattle that specialized in Japanese artwork. That shop had an old master who restored damaged paintings. He was enlisted to repair their painting. The repair is well done. I’m not sure I would have noticed it had they not pointed it out. We got the entire story, with what it said about their family, simply from expressing genuine interest in the pictures on their walls.

I am grateful to have a partner who helps me receive interesting information about our friends. When we were new pastors beginning our careers, she would use conversations about family pictures to let the parishioners we were visiting tell their stories in ways that made us feel like we had met their families. This helped us bond with the people we served in our church work.

Making friends and developing deeper relationships with the community has been a challenging part of retirement. After living in Rapid City, South Dakota, for 25 years, we established many friendships. We had formed relationships with doctors, teachers, and others. We knew the members of our congregation and their families. A meaningful community surrounded us. Then the time came for us to retire. Our retirement was made even more challenging by the COVID-19 pandemic, which reduced the number of opportunities to visit others in their homes. We focused on moving our household, settling into a new home, and establishing necessary professional relationships. Finding a new family doctor, dentist, eye doctor, and others was a challenge. In those days, we could not accompany each other to medical appointments, so we didn’t get to each other’s healthcare professionals.

We are starting to deepen some of our new friendships by sharing meals in their homes and ours. However, it takes time and effort, and there are fewer opportunities to share meals with friends than in other phases of our lives.

Before retiring, we were called to serve congregations in each place we lived. We moved into established communities. Members of the congregations we served were eager to invite us into their homes, and we enjoyed getting to know them. However, after we retired and moved into a new place, we were not so much the center of attention in the church we joined. We have commented that sitting in the pew is much more complicated than we used to think.

Last evening brought a flood of memories to me. In our first parish in North Dakota, a lot of the homes we visited had a framed print of an older man with white hair and a full beard with his hands clasped to his forehead, elbows resting on a table with an uncut loaf of bread, a bowl with a spoon and a thick book with a pair of reading glasses folded on it. Whoever produced those prints hit a ready market in the homes of folks in that area. Later, we saw some homes with a similar print featuring a woman in a similar praying pose over a book with a pair of glasses. Her meal includes a pitcher and a plate with bread and cheese. I don’t know the artist, but both paintings of individuals praying over their simple meals use a very conventional technique of portraying the main subject in the dark with a light coming from the other side of the painting so that their face is illuminated. They are “facing the light,” a bit of less than subtle symbolism in the painting.

Unlike our tour of our friends’ homes decorated with family pictures, furniture and home furnishing stores in shopping malls tend to feature stylized and overly sentimental pictures. At the risk of offending people who genuinely love prints by Thomas Kinkade, they are the type of generic pictures that I associate with shops and marketing. The association is based on the fact that Kinkade was a master marketer. He trademarked his self-description, “Painter of Light,” and created franchises of galleries that marketed pints and merchandise produced on an industrial scale. I have come to think of Kinkade pictures not as examples of great artwork but as generic and often overly idealized scenes. The depictions of idyllic cottages, always with the lights on in every window, set in park or garden settings, may represent joy, comfort, and home to some. Still, to me, they are a saccharine fantasy that leads the beholder away from reality into a disconnected fantasy devoid of the actual diversity and beauty of the world. It is as if the artist is only interested in one side of life. Real life has stress, grief, and pain, and works of art also evoke those sides of life.

Whether or not Kinkade’s prints move you, I am confident that the pictures displayed in your home reflect your values and interests. Even better than seeing your artwork, however, is the opportunity to have you give a tour and tell the stories behind what you have displayed. My wife knows how to ask just the right questions to elicit that tour, and I am grateful that she allows me to come along and hear the stories.