Drawing Jesus

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 had 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.