And the children drew Jesus

 What does Jesus look like?  In the age when digital photography did not exist (except probably in God's mind) we today suffer from a lack of an image of what Jesus actually looked like.  This is a good thing in a way because it allows us to tailor-make his looks to our needs.  Happy. Sad. Gentle. Authoritative.  He looks just as we want Him to look (though He acts only as He wants to, and cannot be bribed!).  Possibly the best people to really picture Jesus are the children because they are freer in their creative thoughts.  My Australian friend Alfred Arena shared with me about the Year of Grace activities at the three parish schools on the Mornington Penninsula in the vicinity of the Port of Hastings on outer Melbourne, Australia, where he works.

One of the methods used by some of the children was to combine a photo of the student with another of the iconic face of Jesus cut up into horizontal  strips and alternately pasted to form a composite that alternate from one to the other. A sort of Jesus reflected in us.  “I find that the collage made up from the different drawings is most interesting from a photographic point of view too” Alfred ointed out; “not to mention the resonance these images have when one reflects of the Face of Christ.”  

He added that the idea came out of the Pope’s encouragement to reflect on the “face of Jesus” in this coming Year.  “Dutifully, when visiting the three parish schools, our parish priest requested that as part of their religious education activity,  the teachers would invite the children in their respective classes “to use their imagination” and make a drawing of the Face of Jesus. These three parish Catholic primary schools have a contingent of 500 children so one may well imagine the volume of material that was to be produced. By the end of the exercise the interior of these schools were decked out with wall to wall pictures of the Face of Jesus."

 

Alfred said that “when I noticed the first pictures that where posted on the school’s main pin board in the foyer at St Marys primary school where I work, I was somewhat confused at the array of so many that looked like distorted faces of Jesus. They reminded me of a recent news segment where an old lady took it upon herself to restore an old beautiful fresco of Jesus in a chapel in Spain with the result that a British news commentator described it as now looking like. “A monkey wearing an ill fitting tunic”. Unquote.

“I asked our religious education coordinator at our school  if the children were at least provided with a model they could work from. The reply was that that was what the parish priest asked for; to simply ask the children to use their imagination to draw Jesus’ face. So I didn’t pursue the enquiry further and left it at that. When during the week I visited another of our Parish primary schools - St Brendan’s – I noticed that one of the teachers used a little prompting in the way her children approached the task of drawing Jesus’ face. The pictures on her classroom windows showed a composite face of Jesus. One  side of the picture was an A4 size photocopy of Jesus’ face found in many common and popular icons while the other half was an attempt to hand draw and complete the face by the student. This while producing some excellent close representations was also marred by many unsatisfactory results full of distortions.  I pondered a while what were all these would be Faces of  Jesus  saying to me. In theory there is only one Face of Jesus they should all resemble instead of all the hodgepodge of distorted images or close approximations.

“Could there be a parable in all these images perhaps? Well I thought that for every Christian Jesus must be the human model we ought to grow into and that for everyone of us there is a present condition that we fit  in that could be as remotely  far from the true model Jesus and as variant as the children’s pictures showed. Many of the drawings show a face with a beard, others with no beard while others showed a face with a Hitler’s moustache. Others show an image of Jesus with Bugs Bunny eyes, or looking more like Queen Elizabeth wearing a crown. And on and on.   It made me sad to think that if  – as the overwhelming majority of the ‘Face of Jesus’ depicted – Christianity is so far out of sync; where is Grace in this Year of Grace?  

"In my confusion" said Alfred, "all I could hear without any distortion whatsoever and unanimously was just the name - Jesus. Every picture was titled Jesus or Jesus Christ. And perhaps that is all that is necessary at this point in time and in our futility; until we see him ‘face to face’. And finally it occurred to me that one other common and unmistakable characteristic was that even when you account for all the distortions what all the children drew was  un-mistakenly  a human face. There is no myth or metaphor in the mystery of the  Incarnation; this is an event in human history.  And God became incarnate and became man and dwelt amongst us; or one could say that God has become  At One with us. Or as we familiarly recall – Emanuel – God with us; no matter how strangely our countenance might be.”