Favorites 6/30: Drawing Jesus

by David Shumate


The first patient drew Jesus as a tall, slender man with three smiling
heads, one eye in the center of each. Another sketched him as a stick figure
wearing a yellow hat. The teenage girl from Alabama drew a white
vulture with a halo above its head. At the table by the window the Hungarian
immigrant whose language no one understood drew a face with a
scar running down his cheek, a ragged red beard, and the kind of wild
eyes that frighten children. The old woman who has lived half-a-century
in the asylum painted a picture of a dozen orange boxes and asked me to
guess which one Jesus was hiding in. I pointed to the box with the
bulge in the middle. The Hungarian started laughing. Then they all
joined in.