A PORTRAIT OF A SHRIVELED SAINT
Eugene H. Peterson
July 1, 1985
Willi Ossa was an artist who worked as a janitor at night in a church on New York's West Side to support his wife and infant daughter. During the day he painted. German by birth, Willi grew up during the war years and then married an American girl, the daughter of an officer in the occupying army. I got to know Willi when I was a theological student working at the same church as an assistant pastor. Willi liked to talk about religion; I liked to talk about art. We became friends. We got along well together and had long conversations. He decided to paint my portrait. I went to his house on West 92nd Street a couple of afternoons a week on my way to work at the church and sat for thirty minutes or so for my portrait. He never permitted me to see what he was painting. Day after day, week after week, I sat while he painted. One day his wife came into the room and looked at the portrait now nearing completion and exclaimed in outrage, "Krank, krank." I knew just enough German to know that she was saying, "Sick! You paint him to look like a corpse!" He answered, "Nicht krank, aber keine Gnade"— "he's not sick; that is the way he will look when the compassion is gone, when the mercy gets squeezed out of him." A few half-understood phrases were enough for me to guess correctly, without seeing the portrait, what Willi was doing. We had often argued late into the night about the Christian faith. He hated the church. He thought Christians were hypocrites—all of them. He made a partial exception for me for friendship's sake. The Christians he had known had all collaborated with and blessed the Nazis. The Christians he had known were responsible for the death camps and the cremation of six million Jews. The Christians he had ...
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