This is a great time to be sick! Traditional medicine can slice and sew you back into shape; homeopathy can cure you of eczema with evening primrose oil and glue ear with goldenseal; therapy can help you release your inner child and scream your way back into health. It's never been more glamorous to be suffering from any range of physical and emotional impediments, and a lady named SARK knows it. She's right in on the game, especially the psychological end of it.

You've probably seen SARK's "How to be an Artist" poster. It's colorful, lively and full of fun suggestions like "plant impossible gardens" and "build a fort with blankets." She's also published upwards of six books in the genre called "inspiration." SARK has created a whole company around herself — she calls it Camp SARK — from which she pours out all sorts of cute wall art, inspirational books, journals and cards, a newsletter called the Museletter and even, in good late '90s fashion, a website. It all sounds pretty straightforward, but I must admit that at first, SARK was a real puzzle to me.

Read just a little bit about SARK and you can't help but be intrigued. She's come a long way. Her childhood was about as bad as it gets — seven years of incest and abuse. She survived it, but, not surprisingly, she walked away with a lot of destructive behaviors, self-hatred, inner isolation, fear and insecurity. Her adult life has been one long struggle against the demons of her past that still want to destroy her soul. The one positive result, she says herself, is that she became intensely creative in response to the evil that she had to combat. Her rich imagination became her safe haven. Now in her mid-40s, SARK has not only her entire artistic oeuvre to show for herself, but also a foundation that offers support to women, children, artists and the elderly. SARK appears to be a real success story.

There are parts of her work that I find myself irresistibly drawn to. SARK finds immense pleasure in the created world. She revels in the beauty of nature, in flowers and trees and beaches and waterfalls and gardens, in juicy mangoes and moonlit nights and even snails. Here is a typical list she's made of things to be joyful about: "Perfect peaches, lilting street musicians, a butterfly landing on your shoulder, happy dogs on the beach, people praying together outside, children wearing pajamas in the daytime, old women on benches." SARK also is brilliant at making friends. She tells of sitting in the lobby of an expensive hotel-restaurant, sketching in her little book, with a sign propped up next to her, stating: Artist Available for Dinner. (It worked!) She is absolutely fearless about meeting new people of all kinds, ages, colors, nationalities: you name it and she'll befriend it.

On the other hand (you knew there was an "on the other hand" coming, didn't you?), there are parts of her work that disturb me. Those have exactly to do with her incessant search for healing. This is what she's done so far to heal herself of her terrible inner scars: "I've been rebirthed, psychologically evaluated, in therapy, massaged, chakras cleared, psychically healed, had acupuncture for emotional reasons, read many, many self-help books, attended workshops, classes, talks about the inner child, the dysfunctional family, AA meetings, OA meetings, Alanon meetings, met with healers, listened to channelers, had out-of-body experiences, studied a course in miracles, been hypnotized and floated in sensory deprivation tanks." Whew! What an exhausting list. For all her efforts, it doesn't sound like any of them have really worked. She still has to force herself daily to be positive, to be open, to trust in and communicate with other people and to resist running away in fear from any kind of conflict. Given her past, it's only to be expected that there have been no simple solutions. The problem is, now she has a new addiction: healing. She's always on the lookout for more and more new ways of healing. She always needs to "work" on herself and her relationships.

Now that's a strange way to live, always working on herself as if she were a sculpture. She likes to say, "You are enough, you have enough, you do enough," but I don't think she really believes it. She claims that being positive is a choice, and overcoming the negative is a possibility, but she just works so hard at it. In fact, you might say that her self-affirmation is frantic. Keeping up the conviction that everything is going to be okay almost takes more effort than she can muster, even at her most energetic. If she lets down her postivity-shield for a moment, she might collapse. Listen, for example, to some of her warm and well-meaning statements: "Women's hearts are rare, deep, and wide." "I think of all of us as music boxes — beautiful and full of music ... especially when we open up." "You are valuable just as your are." "Give yourself the gift of self-healing. Your presence is the actual gift." "Your mistakes are treasures, and so are you!" "We are endowed with power by our very birth." "You are so deeply loved." That's nice to know. The problem is that SARK is begging some awfully big questions here. Why am I valuable? I want to ask her. Who loves me so much? What difference does my life or death make really? Is the world really changed by my existence? I think she'd have trouble coming up with an answer. At best she might say that believing all these things will make me a happier person. Fair enough. But why do even happiness and unhappiness matter?

* * *

The key to the puzzle is that SARK has been looking for what works instead of looking for what is true. Here is SARK's statement of faith, as you might call it: "I'm an Aries with Virgo rising and a Scorpio moon, a 9 on the enneagram, a sage in the Michael teachings, a secret and skeptical Christian, a dabbling Buddhist, and in a committed and monogamous relationship with a man." You'd think with so many things working in her favor, SARK would have been able to settle on something that healed her once and for all. Her first problem, though, is that it's not reasonable to dabble in so many different and mutually exclusive worldviews. Americans are really good at doing exactly that, as if you can just set aside rationality when it comes to ultimate things. Unfortunately, pointing out to someone that her religion is unreasonable usually doesn't accomplish much good (trust me, I've been there). Irrationality doesn't damage the comfort factor of a religious system most of the time, especially when its main purpose is just to "work." The plain (and sometimes frustrating) fact is that lots of religious systems can "work for you," if you use them the right way. But the comforting words that we label wisdom or religion just aren't the same thing as truth.

This is where the human inclination to self-deception comes in. Reasonably or not, people can deceive themselves into feeling comforted or forgiven when there's really no good reason to feel that way. SARK proves that point by employing some para-Christian language in her litany of self-comforts. She suspects there's something useful there, but she only wants the bits and pieces of it that work. She says things like, "Love is a mystery and doesn't keep score," echoing St. Paul, and advises that you should "see the grace in as much as you can see." You should "choose innocence" but still "investigate your darknesses," a poetic way of dancing around some serious confrontations with sin. One of her most telling self-revelations is found in a list of questions she gives you to ask yourself about sexuality, where she inquires, "Is your morality yours, or the regurgitation of your parents' and/or religious beliefs?" That's a pretty loaded question! I can't imagine what the correct answer to that could possibly be. ("Yes, I have vomited up everything my parents taught me"?) If your morality is really just yours, the way SARK wants it to be, it can't function the way morality is supposed to, and thus lets you fool yourself all the more.

Then again, self-deception only goes so far, and SARK, I suspect, knows it. Her random compilation of ideas and images that comfort her spiritually aren't truly feeding her soul because they are not honest. They are not honest because they want to trick her into thinking the world is really a pretty nice chummy place, as long as she keeps her chin up and makes some more friends. They fool her into thinking that she can fix herself and be permanently happy on her own, that the other people in her lives can offer her perfect fulfillment, that her creative expression is the be-all and end-all of her being. It's an appealing worldview. She's not completely stupid to buy into it. The real story of the world, though, is not about positive thinking. Review world history or read great works of literature or look at famous art. There you will find two basic unchanging factors of human existence: the devastation of sin and the longing for God. They are, respectively, why unhappiness and happiness matter at all.

Christianity has always been brutally honest about this. People are really messed up; that's just the way they are. It comes of being separated from God, and once separated from God, people lose all value. They're just animals with a peculiar ability to hurt one another and the planet. But bring God back into the picture, and the whole perspective is changed. Those sinful creatures no longer need to hunt down excuses to value themselves: their baptisms have given them more value than anything else they could possibly invent for themselves. Even with baptism there is still pain and death, but suddenly death and pain have meaning: they are the way of the cross that brings us into everlasting life with our saving God. The ultimate goal of healing, for Christians, is definite and permanent: to bring us into the heavenly courts of God the Father on high.

And that is why SARK's endless project of herself strikes me as so sad. She doesn't know where it's taking her — just an ill-defined sense of well-being — and it will never really succeed in wiping all her tears away. Worse, perhaps, is that it never lets her out of herself. She can never afford to stop looking after her health, so even the deep and lovely friendships she has always have to try to fill the void where God should be. Creation finally won't satisfy when the Creator is needed.

There is a beautiful line in C.S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy, when Hwin the mare sees Aslan (the Christ figure) for the first time. She says, "You may eat me if you like. I'd sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else." That is the real disposition SARK needs to be healed of her healing. If God swallows her up in His grace, then she won't need to be fed by any more psychobabble. Perhaps she would understand if I made her a poster.