Written by Father Michael
I first heard of Andre Dubus twenty years ago. My daughter worked in a used and rare book store in Indianapolis. The owner was a young man who had a great love of literature and writing. He wrote religiously every day. He also loved writers and knew their books. He was an expert on rare books and evaluated books for estates. He would also go on buying trips and I joined him on some trips. I read in a trade magazine an article on Dubus and how his first books were all very limited productions and may someday be of value. So I started to look for them to collect for investment reasons. Well I never found any first editions but I did find a treasure of reading. (Those first editions now go from $25 to $5,500)
Dubus started to get more press twenty years ago because he was just recovering from an accident that put him in a “moveable chair” the rest of his life. His friends, Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike, held a benefit for him. He had twenty-five years of excellent stories in his library that were admired mainly by his fellow writers. His tragic accident just pushed him into the limelight.
The treasure that I found in this earthly man’s stories was his deep love of the Eucharist. So each year when the church celebrates Corpus Christi and I think of the meaning of the real presence I go back to reading Dubus. He is not a theologian but he describes in his short stories more clearly than any theologian what the “Real Presence” means. He also opens our eyes to the love that God has for us. A love that gives, a love that does not demand anything in return. A love that we cannot understand but only receive.
One of his characters says “Belief is believing in God: Faith is believing that God believes in you.” That love that God has for his creation, us, you, is central to Dubus. His characters and Dubus are not saints. They are very human and sinful, but they experience God’s love and desire to participate in it. God invites them, touches them happily, welcomes their company.
Sacraments are important to them. “Í need sacraments I can receive through my senses. I need God manifested as Christ, who ate and drank … suffered, and laughed. So I can dance with Him as the leave dances in the breeze under the sun.”
Why come to church? “I can receive, through the Eucharist, and also at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation. But I cannot achieve contemplation, as some can, and so, having to face and forgive my own failures, I learned from them both the necessity and wonder of ritual. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.”
Dubus spent the last thirteen years of his life in a “moveable chair” and died of a heart attack at sixty –two. On-line you can read his short story “Love in the Morning” by searching “Andre Dubus, Love in the Morning”. His last book, MEDITATIONS FROM A MOVEABLE CHAIR may be ordered from any bookseller.