MULTIMODAL SEMIOTICS OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES: REPRESENTING BELIEFS, METAPHORS, AND ACTIONS



15

24  Drawings

I’m only going to show you two pictures that Edward was asked to draw. On the left is his representation
of God. Notice how it’s consistent with the description he gave before and how his gestures imagistically
drew in space what he’s put on paper. God is a tan man, and he’s placed in a bounded region like what he
saw in his vision in front of him, like a hologram. What is more interesting, though, is that when he was
drawing God the Father, he started with the body and only at the end did he draw the head and the face,
the parts more identifiable with a person.

In his second drawing he was asked to draw a picture of himself and then to place God in the picture.
When he was drawing himself, he began with a large head in the middle of the page (and no body). Notice
that he has a beard, whereas God the Father in his first drawing does not, which is unusual since typically
in Western culture God the Father is depicted with a beard. In this second representation God is drawn in,
but not as a person, which may be more relational. Rather, God is an amorphous ball in the upper right-
hand corner, and right after that, he draws a divide right between himself and God. Because of reasons of
time, and my incompetence in psychoanalysis, I’m going to leave you with your own personal
interpretations, but I can confidently say that having to classify Edward’s individual positions in relation
to his belief in God, he is one “who struggle with a demanding, harsh God [he] would like to get rid of if
[he] were not convinced of his existence and power.”2

2 Rizzuto, A.-M. (1979). The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
p. 91.



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