Families gathered at the McMullen Museum on October 27 to hear Karen Kiefer, Director of the Church in the 21st Century Center (C21 Center), read aloud from her new children’s book, Drawing God. Released on October 8 through Paraclete Press, the book is Illustrated by Belgian artist Kathy De Wit, with whom Kiefer collaborated in her last children’s book, The Misfit Sock. “I had no intentions of writing the book,” Kiefer says, “but God had other plans.”
The book chronicles the story of a young girl, Emma, as she seeks to represent God in her drawings, hoping that they might meet the approval of her friends at school. Emma feels inspired by the paintings of Picasso, before she feels moved to depict God. In her first attempt, Emma renders a bright sun, before proclaiming, “I knew I had drawn God.” However, “Her friends think she’s crazy,” the author recalls, explaining the storyline, “because they can’t see God.” Emma’s second try, drawing God as a loaf of bread, is also met with hostility from her friends at school.
Kiefer said her initial inspiration for writing the story sprang from a trip to the grocery store, when she overheard a small child recalling his mother had recommending that he not mention God at school, out of fear that it would make others feel uncomfortable. Struck by the revelation that children feel limited in religious self-expression, Kiefer questioned, “What happens if we’re gonna not be able to talk about God?” She felt she needed to change that perception, so she began to write.
The author relied on some personal experiences for inspiration. “I think about my Emma,” Kiefer says of her daughter, “She was my muse for the story.” One of Kiefer’s four children, the non-fictional Emma “always loved museums and art,” so it seemed fitting to begin the story in a museum, and to integrate an artistic context.
Emboldened by the rejection of her classmates, Emma began her third attempt to recreate God in pictorial fashion, appealing, “Please God, help me draw you.” Wearing her red crayons to depletion, she proceeds to draw a large red heart, which her schoolmates again assail as far from resembling God: “Emma, God is not a Valentine.” After consultation in prayer, Emma attains a sense of self-assurance that she had indeed envisioned God in her drawings, no matter how much her peers judge her artwork.
Pausing amid her own recitation, Kiefer recalls her consideration of Emma’s consolation as the final scene of the book. In the end, however, the book acquired an impactful epilogue in the addition of another page. Emma returns to school the next day to find all her classmates drawing God, and every picture was different. “Everyone sees God differently,” Kiefer concludes, as she returns to her intentions for producing the children’s book, “and that’s really one of the messages of the book.”
This message has certainly resonated with the general public. Within days, Kiefer’s book climbed atop several best-seller categories for children’s fiction on Amazon, and it has thus far held steady as the number one seller among the “Emotions and Feelings” category of Christian children’s literature. Kiefer lamented, “sometimes we don’t feel like our work is good enough,” but the success of her book proves to writers, as well as young artists like Emma, that the act of creation can be spiritually rewarding in itself.
In conjunction with the release of her book, Kiefer and the C21 Center have established November 7 as “World Drawing God Day.” Through social media activity and inclusion among the curricula of Catholic educators, Kiefer envisions, her book might help in spreading this “world movement.”
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