Art Brown

Art Brown was showing me his art work. He produced a large piece of white paper, on which was drawn a small face surrounded by bold red strokes that swept in two large arcs toward the top of the page. The words he had crayoned at the bottom of the page read "The late Aunt Minnie encased in a lobster claw."

I knew he had lived the last two decades of his 64 years in Maine, where lobsters are abundant, but still I was mystified at why he had decided to encase Aunt Minnie in one of their claws. When I asked him about it, he grinned and explained, "Well, I was trying to draw a Christmas angel—but it didn't come out quite right."

"Look at this one," he said as he held up a drawing labeled "Hey, lady, you got eggs in a nest growing in your hair, in case you haven't noticed!" He explained that he had gotten a bit carried away with her bouffant hairstyle and had to add the nest to justify all the hair.

We laughed together as he held up his drawings one by one. After he had shown them all, he became suddenly serious, and his gaze rested on me. When our eyes met, they were filled with tears. So much was between us; but so much was lost.

I thought back six years to the 10th-floor balcony of a YMCA in New York City, late at night, with a stream of yellow cabs below and the East River in the distant view. Art, my favorite college professor, had brought 20 other college students and me to East Harlem for six weeks. It was my first real glimpse of desperate poverty, racial alienation, and rage born out of generations of suffering.

East Harlem changed my life. And Art, in all his wisdom and care, received my pain and confusion as I started on a path in East Harlem that led me away from the assumptions about America with which I had grown up. Art listened for hours on the 10th-floor balcony in New York—and hours more back at college in Maine as I sorted out my faith and my future.

My time in East Harlem was the most formative early experience in my journey toward Sojourners. In the years following, whenever I thought of whom I would like to keep in touch with through the years to help me reflect on my life and its changes, Art always came to mind. He was teacher, mentor, and friend.

On November 6, 1978, a massive stroke claimed Art's speech and crippled the right side of his body. I grieved for his loss as well as my own. We would never again share the late-night political, theological, and personal conversations that had been a part of our past and a hope for our future. It felt unfair.

As Art slowly healed, he kept a diary, painstakingly recorded with his functional left hand. He wrote that the stroke had come "like a thief and stole my memory" and pleaded on paper, "Plug up the holes in my brain, please ... They're killing me ... They're making an awful draft."

The anguish was profound as Art started over again like a child, practicing simple arithmetic in his diary and wrestling with emotions that often seemed out of control. His sentences often hung in midair, unfinished.

The helplessness was the most devastating thing for us both. On my first visit after the stroke, I held his hand and offered a prayer for him before leaving. After my "Amen," he began the Lord's Prayer; it was the only thing his battered brain remembered from beginning to end. When we had finished, he wept and said, "All I have left is faith. I cry to God that I can live a righteous life." Our prayer and tears were our deepest communication.

ON MY SECOND VISIT a year later, Art invited me to read his now-copious journals. I pored over them late into the night. Two years after his stroke, he had written, "What a treasure trove I have stored up in my smashed brain." He was right. Where intellect had died, wit, warmth, and poetry burst forth.

Of his inability to speak, he wrote, "As the voice of the female cricket speaks, so speak I unto thee, O Lord, for the female cricket makes no sound when it speaks." He also wrote of his suffering, "A snow-flake is a tiny thing compared to the sky. Pain is as nothing when measured to the tune of everything else in the universe."

Perhaps most hopeful to me was his sense of humor, his ability to laugh at himself and his predicament, what he called "struggling from tears to cheers." He wrote about "mailslotitis," his inability to mail a letter without use of his right hand to hold the slot open. Reflecting after an operation, when to laugh pulled at his stitches and was painful, he wrote, "If you can't laugh, be one." And of his changed situation, he asked, "Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? I really don't know the answer to all three of those questions."

His brain put forth remarkable puns and plays on words. On a hopeful day he recorded, "The worst of my stroke of bad luck is over." And on a sadder day, he wrote, "Pealing bells and peeling onions are not the same thing at all. But both can make you weep. Take away our crying and you deprive us of our humanity."

Art's recovery continues, and he has rediscovered himself as a poet. In his struggle, he has taught me what it means to persevere. The only way it can be done is with faith and humor. I'm beginning to see that that lesson is more important than all that I could have gleaned from him in a lifetime of late-night conversations.

I have never seen such a longing in anyone, so evident in Art's eyes, for God, for healing, for understanding—above all, for God. When all else is stripped away, faith remains. Art is learning child-like faith and total dependence on God and inviting me to follow. As he articulated it in his journal, "I want to spend the rest of my life playing 'Follow the Leader' with Christ." It's an admirable vocation.

As we try to follow, we won't always be successful or graceful or articulate. But maybe with a grain of faith and a dose of humor, we can learn to flow with what we are given. And if a Christmas angel looks more like Aunt Minnie in the clutches of a killer lobster, so be it.

Joyce Hollyday was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.