River of Life
I was walking through the galleries of Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas last week accompanied by my husband, Hunter, and our tour guide, Jenn Padgett, the museum’s Curator of Craft. As Jenn and I were chatting I heard Hunter make an excited gasp—he could see something at the end of the natural light-filled corridor that I could not yet see.
My heart started to beat faster when I quickly realized what it was. I squeezed Jenn’s arm and grinned at her, wide-eyed. She smiled knowingly. We all increased our pace. And then I saw it for myself—the 9-foot tall by 7-foot wide Tiffany stained glass window, known to Sunset Ridge as the “River of Life,” gloriously installed within a deep-hued teal wall and backlit to simulate the daylight that used to pour through its panes for decades while it was here in our historic chapel at Sunset Ridge.
This moment was exhilarating—to watch as museum guests around us gazed in wonder at the window and to know the journey that it took to arrive at its present home. Jenn and I worked together to relocate the window from Sunset Ridge to Crystal Bridges. We met in spring of 2024 when she visited our campus for the first time to see the window. This was the start of a years-long process of coordinating with experts in stained glass preservation to achieve this intricate feat.
Can I use the word miracle to describe the window’s relocation and restoration? The deinstallation took nine hours and not a single piece of glass was broken. Then the window travelled in custom-built crates loaded onto an 18-wheeler to California where a team of stained glass preservationists painstakingly conserved it for ten months. In some parts of the window there are as many as three layers of glass to create Tiffany Studio’s distinctive visual depth. The team cleaned between each layer, sometimes delicately placing a piece on a cotton ball soaked with a mild cleaner so as not to disturb the rare confetti glass, fused with colorful shards. When the window finally made its way to Crystal Bridges the team had designed and built a custom wall to permanently house the window, with a bespoke LED lighting panel system hidden in the wall that can be programmed to simulate different times of day, such as the warmth of sunset. Again, not a piece of glass was broken in the reinstallation.
The morning that we arrived at Crystal Bridges, Hunter’s first time to visit, we walked along the meandering wildflower-laden Art Trail carved through the forest of the nearly 200 acres of the museum’s campus. Hunter remarked that there is quite possibly no better place for Sunset Ridge’s beloved window to have found a new home.
Crystal Bridges welcomes nearly one million guests every year, including tens of thousands of school children, uniquely offering free general admission for all as America’s Art Museum. Their mission is to welcome all to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art with the beauty of nature. The museum’s founder, Alice Walton, also has a mission to reshape medical education with an emphasis on whole health and recently opened a medical school on the campus.
Throughout our years of working together on this project, Jenn and I have shared a fascination with the parallels between our organizations. Crystal Bridges and Sunset Ridge both exist for the flourishing of our communities, prioritizing accessibility and welcome, creativity, and nature. Both organizations are also interested in their larger identity as institutions, the Museum and the Church. How can we honor what is good about the legacies of these institutions while continuing, in our case, to follow God’s imagination for what’s next in our particular community?
Another interesting parallel is the connection between art and healing. Our campus is here because in the 1920s the Woodmen of the World built a state-of-the-art tuberculosis hospital that included an ecumenical chapel. The chapel’s designers sourced the best local artisans and materials they could at the time, including the stunning Tiffany stained glass windows. Perhaps I am making an assumption, but to me these choices implicitly communicate a belief that beauty and creativity are essential to human healing and flourishing. Crystal Bridges’ founder shares this belief, especially with her tandem investments in the arts and healthcare.
If you want to hear more of the incredible story of our window, please come and talk to me—I love telling it. So much of it feels divinely written, and I am honored and privileged to have been along for the ride. I’m grateful for those of you in this congregation who, after living with and caring for this window for so many years, entrusted those of us who stewarded it through this process of finding a new home.
If you have the opportunity, I hope you’ll make the pilgrimage to Bentonville to see this treasure so beautifully restored in its new home. And if you can’t make the trip just yet, there’s good news: this week our replica window is being installed in the chapel so that we can continue to enjoy the beautiful image that has defined this space for so many years, and that now tells an even bigger story.
