On The Passing of Good Men (1 March 2004)

The death of Brent Malone this week not only shocked me, but shook me. He was too young, for one thing. And for another, he was too special.

Those feelings are absurd, of course, and extremely personal. Death is the one thing that does not discriminate. No one is too young, too special, too bad, too good, too black, too white, or too holy to die. The delusions of some North Americans aside, it is the one sure thing.

But this isn't going to be about death, per se, but about the goodness of men who do what they were born to do, who recognize the gifts bestowed upon them by the Creator and who respect themselves and those gifts and their Creator enough to sacrifice money, social standing, parental approval, religious recognition, and material security for the exercise of those gifts.

Brent Malone was one of them.

He was a man who was called to create. Anyone who has got that call and is honest about it will recognize its inherent divinity. I say that with a sense of worship, not blasphemy, because I believe that the call to create, whether that creation be dance, or drama, or art, or music, or words, is part of our reflection of God's image. Those of us who are called to express the beauty or the anguish or the wonder or the terror of the world around us are blessed with some of the mind of our Maker, and when we ignore that call, we ignore Him.

And so the goodness of men like Brent.

He was called to express what he saw of his world through the medium of the visual arts, and he heeded that call with all the integrity of the blessed or the mad. He put down the nets that had been woven for him, and he studied fine art when for a Bahamian to do so in this country was lunacy. He lived the life of the artist, on a limb, taking risks that were neither necessary nor prudent when he could live the tried-true life of a shopkeeper. As an artist, he looked without fear at himself and the world around him, and obeyed that divine call. And in so doing, he gave us all ourselves.

I once met a woman who was a quadriplegic. She'd lost the use of her arms and legs — I don't remember how — and was confined to a wheelchair. The only part of her that still looked truly human was her head; the rest of her body was flabby and shapeless, where the muscles had been replaced by flab. She didn't care. Her Christianity had enough muscles for all of her.

She talked to me about false images, the collective images which we make for ourselves of what is right, or normal, or good, or Christian, or proper. She believed that any image that stands between us and our ability to see God's image in our fellow human beings or His wonder in the world around us is an idol. She knew what she was talking about. She was a veteran of the experience of being looked at as a freak because of her disability, and as a result she saw with part of the eye of God.

Brent Malone's images were true images. He broke the false gods raised up for us all, and painted what he saw. By choosing to acknowledge his own vision of the world around him, and by exposing that vision to the public in his art, he chose a life of more honesty and vulnerability than most of us can bear. By choosing to make his art his life and not his hobby, he demonstrated a kind of courage and a kind of faith that inspired the generations behind him. And by remaining, for as long as I was privileged to know him, humble and unaffected and non-judgemental and loving and interested in all of life, he was truly, truly himself.

Our society is all the richer for men like him. We have no idea how much richer, because we don't always understand the nature of their work. We are far too occupied with our idols, and with sorting through the treasures we have piled up on this earth really to notice.

These men are our giants, although we don't know or particularly care. They are our builders, our contractors, and the strength of our society rests upon the quality of their work. While so many of us preoccupy ourselves with exercising the politics of exclusion, with the creating of labels and affixing them to the images we have made of our world — God lives in this box, Bahamians in that, good Christian people can occupy this bus, but homosexuals or Haitians or heathens of any sort can't come in the door — men like Brent are quietly working to build a home that will hold us all.

And so I'm writing this article in celebration of good men like Brent Malone. I have had the good fortune to meet several of them: men who could have fame or fortune in other countries, but who have sacrificed that to stay here and give their gifts freely and without recognition to the society that made them. I was raised by one of them, and am married to another. These men, like Brent, live out their lives, quietly creating us, laying up for us treasures in heaven, while we surround ourselves with treasures on earth.

You see, many of us don't understand about heaven. We have swallowed a picture of the world that is the residue of a capitalist, imperialist, enslaving society. The heaven on which we're taught to focus is a heaven that has nothing to do with who we are really; much of that we consider taboo. Too many of us spend our lifetimes trying to be people we are not; and so we fill our lives with images that are false and destructive and small.

In this world, the greatest of us are those who can look around and see what is really there. Those of us who seek to express our deepest selves, to appreciate and to revel in beauty, to be honest before the public and to love every bit of ourselves are our true-true Bahamians, for they are the ones on whom our future is built. Brent Malone was one of us who did that, and I salute the passing of this good man.