(All italicised texts are excerpts from Milton Rokeach’s case study, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. This case follows three men, who individually believed that they each were reincarnations of Jesus Christ, who were admitted to Ypsilanti State so that their delusions could be studied and monitored.)

Ypsilanti State Hospital received three new patients in the year 1959. 

The day was as beautiful as can be; The Sun was shining, and the leaves were falling naturally on the pavement. Each day was the same beautiful day, for what those three men were was love, and what they loved was the world, with as much as they could give from within the hospital. We asked for their names.

“Yes, I’m God.” 

It’s not polite to ask a man who is undoubtedly sure of his identity whether he really is who he claims to be. Despite that, we tried our best to confirm the validity of their introductions. They had no doubt that they had created the Earth and all the beauty within it, and we did not doubt that the purpose of their supposed creation was an attempt to understand their place in our world. “I want to be myself,” they told us. We let them, for what greater joy is there than to have three pieces of a fantastic whole, walking alongside you? They were born, “Good boy, nothing wrong, a quiet boy.” They were born with a love that refused to dissipate, no matter how desolate their world was.

They refused to see any wrong with their world; They gave us their quarters; they gave us all their breath and all the words they knew. They gave us quarters until they had no more quarters left, and then they gave us nickels. 

They couldn’t change our minds, despite the quarters, despite how many pieces of themselves they gave to us. As long as they were in that hospital, they remained three men born of the Earth, and though we promised to look beyond their bodies and try, we could see nothing else. 

And that was okay. As long as they could pretend to understand themselves, as long as we didn’t force them to cry with the weight of not knowing who they really were. Even then, they’d forgive us, because “tears are the greatest antiseptic.”  Even then, they’d see it as a favor. 

“You can’t push a person into Heaven.”

Deep inside their clouded minds, they knew they were just human, and in the best way they could, they asked for our forgiveness. They asked us to forgive them for being a creature so low as to be walking upon the ground itself, and we wondered why they, who had given us every inch of their hearts, and their minds, and their souls, refused to keep any for themselves. Like a friend and like a lover, they begged not to be left alone. Though they’d been lonely long enough, we could not give them Papa, and we could not replace Mama, either. Grown men with no parents – had they ever escaped childhood? “My foster father was not a sandpiper,” they claimed.  It made sense, we supposed; unlike the devoted father sandpiper, their fathers had flown away.

“I prefer to be a swallow, a bird that comes north in the summer and goes south in the winter. A little swallow so they won’t see you or bother you.”

They prayed for a ball of lightning to save them when they had nothing to say, when their songs escaped them, and they had nothing left to read. A ball of lightning would illuminate the confusion, and they dreamed that following it would come a beautiful rain that would wash the Earth clean. They saw color bursting outwards from the ground, and a sun that shone upon their faces unlike before. What a radiant day it would be!

There were no granted wishes; With only the dollar they were given from those they wanted to believe were their wives (those wives, made of imagination and prayer), they wrote hundreds of letters. Letters to us, letters to people who did not exist, letters to fathers asking to bring their children back home. They could not understand why they were in Ypsilanti. They could not understand why they had been forsaken and left alone. They only wanted us to believe what they did not – they wanted our belief to convince them that they were real, that they had four limbs, two eyes, and a mind not lost to their conditions. They wanted us to pray for them to return to heaven but we could not. We could only give them a dollar, and they could only write more letters. A dollar for everything they had to say, for every grievance, for every wish, for every hope that would not come true.

“There is nothing wrong. Yesterday I know I was what I am. Today I am what I am. I’m not worried about losing my identity.” 

“If anything bothers me, I soon can get rid of it. Before I have a headache or any thought I don’t want to have, I just snap it.”

As though they were in a stupor, they couldn't look into their own reflection and recognize what it was that we saw. They saw halos, and angels, and trumpets, rather than the misery that was so clearly reflected upon their countenance, which broke our hearts as they would look past us, asking for a light from shadows we couldn’t see. They’d pass around a cigarette, sharing smoke and a heart that strained to push outwards from inside their chests, to expand and swallow the world around them, to make it the home from which they wouldn’t be displaced; Not to Quebec, or to London, or to the rural American South, or to a confessional booth, or to an empty house…. 

“A man has to face life. A man has to avoid dangers so he won’t perish.”  The danger encroached upon them every minute, and they prayed and prayed, praying not to perish. But a man can only keep himself whole for so long, and he will not always be able to keep together all four quarters of his one dollar. 

Christ in his three bodies, of course, could not tolerate hate. “If I hate another person, I rip myself apart. I undermine my own self. Hating because of hate is the yardstick they use in hell. It’s the negative form of love.” Negitivism had no place in that room; There was no space for doubt, for skepticism… Already, their lives were so saturated with this incredible and unreasonable tendency of those around them to disapprove of what, to them, was such an irrefutable performance. Why couldn’t anybody understand that this holy love embodied in these three bent-over, sallow men, stood right before them? It was beyond faith – it was looking into their eyes, and yet we could not believe.

“...I stretched my arms up and went into the fourth or fifth level of light.

I felt myself and it seemed real peaceful. It was so peaceful that I would have liked to remain dead, but God didn’t call me.”

So unbelievably lonesome must they have felt, for tears to fall at the thought of an imaginary lover, whom they could not reach, see, hear, or touch – they waited outside in the blistering cold for her to take their hands and take them home. Still, as they did every night, they wound up back in their cold beds in the psychiatric wing of that dark house for their sick minds. 

Fake letters piled up from the doctor, from the nurse, from the aide, trying to encourage them to bring themselves back to the Earth we knew. We begged them to use all their might and what was left of their agency to pull themselves back to reality on only the weakest of tethers. We made flimsy promises of marriage and of companionship, despite that unfortunate understanding that they would forever remain unfulfilled. The Christs knew it too – they wanted to believe so terribly, but no man can uphold an iron will for that long when the fractures in his heart grow deeper every day. Yet, when those three awoke each morning, they opened every new letter with an excitement and a hope that faded, just a little, with every new sunrise. We tried to ask them why they strained so impossibly to believe that opaque vision, and they only smiled, oblivious to the tears rolling down their chins and the dimming light in their eyes, and told us that,

“...it’s a pleasant feeling to have someone think of you.”

Last in the parade, the “Christs” in their three bodies trailed after the sick, the broken, and the unworthy. Closing out the ceremony with the floral gifts of their Holy Father, they made it beautiful for us, and they were not praised. They picked up the broken pieces as they walked, backs hunched and eyes to the ground, and they were not praised. Within their worldly falsehood, they said: “Thank you.” They said, “Thank you, across our three bodies, for allowing me to become the boundary between the unfortunate, the cold, and the world outside this Holy land. Thank you for allowing me to go down into the dirt, for I can only be so humble. Thank you for allowing me my humility, because despite my love for my father’s world, I do not deserve to pick flowers, and I do not deserve to round out the parade.”

Yours very truly,

Jesus Christ (and his two counterparts in Holy correspondence)