Forgiving Andre
The Sacramental Vision of Andre Dubus
Andre Dubus dipped his fingers in the holy water and crossed himself in the church vestibule. While he had been in the hospital, a priest visited often and presented the Eucharist and he had taken it with gratitude. This was the first Mass in church he had attended in six months. He prepared himself to hear the Word of God. The priest entered and the people stood, pews creaking in relief. He remained seated. With the people he beat his breast, repeating “Through my fault, through my fault, through my fault” and he knew the sin of unforgiveness lingered in him, unforgiveness towards the woman who’d sent him to the hospital not through his fault, but hers. When the people stood to sing, a phantom pain reminded him that it had been a half year, two seasons, since he’d participated in the liturgy. A muscle memory twitched but could not find the full motion. His thoughts drifted during the homily and then the people pulled down the kneelers and lowered themselves to their knees in adoration and he looked at his legs, one amputated above the knee and the other ruined, crushed beyond any use and the priest lifted the host. Dubus couldn’t kneel and he would never kneel ever again. The priest said, “Pray that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God.”
Before the accident, Dubus had observed Mass and received the Eucharist daily. Before the accident, Dubus built a writing career that included seven lauded books, a MacArthur grant, and a teaching career. And before the writing he’d been an officer in the Marines. In fact, he recounts a Marine friend visiting him in the hospital, saying, “Marine Corps training is why you were on the highway that night.” In July of 1986, Dubus came across a pair of stranded motorists, a brother and sister. He pulled over to help them, as he had made it his habit to do. Crossing the road in the twilight, he and the brother were struck by a passing car. He managed to push the sister out of the way, but the brother was killed instantly. Dubus’ legs were crushed, he hit the windshield and landed on the trunk of the car—conscious the entire time—but in shock. In an interview, Dubus recounts that the woman driving the car, got out of the driver’s seat and told passersby that she didn’t do it. The one thing she repeated over and over, that she verbalized, was that she didn’t do it.
Terry Gross asked him on NPR’s Fresh Air how he was able to eventually forgive the driver. “Growing up with the passion of Christ as your example of ‘This is how things are going to be’ gives you the expectation of suffering,” he said. “I’d mention her name every morning. I prayed for her because I knew I couldn’t go around hating somebody. That destroys you.” He said it took ten months once he began to pray for her, then “finally a grace came” to him.
Praying the Lord’s Prayer would take Dubus through “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” According to the prayer Jesus modeled, to be reconciled to God in forgiveness requires a forgiveness of perpetrators. The Catholic church recognizes forgiveness, or reconciliation to God and others, as a sacrament as holy as the Eucharist, baptism, and marriage. In Dubus’ daily attendance of Mass, he would have had to confront his unforgiveness in order to receive the Eucharist.
As he said to Ms. Gross, holding onto hate would have destroyed him, kept him beastlike and diminished from what he would have considered to be a “human potential for transcendence.” Dubus’ friend Tobias Wolff, writing in the introduction Broken Vessels, explains that “his is a sacramental vision of life in which ordinary things participate in the miraculous, the miraculous in ordinary things….the conviction that the possibility of freedom and grace, even heroism, abides in every life…A story of human impatience becomes a story of God’s infinite patience with us.”
I think his stories are important for these reasons. Most of life takes place outside of the church walls, however, and most of Dubus’ audience likely doesn’t share his faith. Plenty of his stories feature the church’s holy sacraments, but most of them do not. Still, that sacramental understanding of the world—miraculous in the ordinary—bleeds through into stories and characters who’ve never set foot in a church. In his three connected novellas—collected as We Don’t Live Here Anymore—he creates what he calls a “secular sacrament” moment in which the reader, watching an ordinary person who acts with love and devotion, can perceive a glimmer of something miraculous. The characters are not heroic, nor typically virtuous.
Falling out of love, the protagonist Hank decides that he is going to “get rid” of his wife, Edith, and begins to drive her away. Eventually Edith takes another lover, Hank’s best friend Jack. The affair begins in lust, but soon Jack is diagnosed with a terminal illness and suddenly everything about their relationship becomes important, even vacuuming the living room. In a conversation with Kay Bonetti, Dubus explains:
Edith cleans Jack’s apartment, and I wanted to use the word dance, but I said that’s too obvious. I said maybe I can write it in such a way that a reader will feel that this is not a simple pushing of a vacuum cleaner. This is a— what’s the word I’m looking for?—metaphysical act. This is the sacrament. This is a gift she’s giving. And I’m sure I didn’t succeed in the prose. But that’s what I wanted to show. And that everything, because he was dying, everything she did for him was like a sacrament: bringing him shrimp; making love with him. Because of that relationship with him she sees…more clearly— what she and Hank have lost and decides that it’s worth the pain to get what she knows can be gotten from a human being, and to be able to give that to a human being.
Some of Dubus’ characters do attend a Catholic church and do take the holy sacraments. Luke Ripley, the main character in “A Father’s Story” discusses taking the Host in a way that surely inspires awe and reverence.
“Ritual allows the man who cannot will himself out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love…as I take the Host…and place it on my tongue and return to the pew, a feeling that I am thankful I have not lost in the forty-eight years since my first Communion. At its center is excitement; spreading out from it is the peace of certainty. Or the certainty of peace.”
This paragraph arrives as Luke tells the reader not to think of him as a spiritual person. He lists a few of his minor faults like being unable to keep his attention on the words of the liturgy; his failure to achieve contemplation. But there are other moments in the story in which his friend and priest, Father Paul, gives small permissions and indulgences. For example, Catholics are supposed to abstain from eating meat on Fridays, but are able to eat fish to honor the sacrifice of Christ’s flesh on Good Friday. Luke and Father Paul go duck hunting on a Friday. With a warm bag full of trophies on the seat of the car between them, Father Paul says, “I believe duck is more rightly a creature of the water than the land, and is rightly not meat.” This seems a minor indulgence, one in which no reader would likely fault Luke for participating. The looseness which the priest excuses the rule so they can cook supper that night, which was not merely an incontinent sin of convenience, exposes something deeper.
Dubus clearly believed the Eucharist to be a true. He also demonstrated that forgiveness and reconciliation with God were supremely important, especially in his healing emotionally and physically from his injuries. His heroism and overcoming what may have killed others to find freedom and grace from his hatred depended on his sacramental vision. Yet, he’s no hero. He’s flippant about another of the sacraments: marriage. Dubus was married three times, the sin that besets so many writers. His third wife was nineteen and a former student when he began dating her at forty-one. Had this happened now, he would have been driven from public life with whips and exposés in the New Yorker. Kay Bonetti asked him, “How are you able to receive Communion? Have the rules changed in the church? You’re divorced and remarried.” He responds,
They haven’t, but I’m sort of living in a little existential foxhole. In other words, I think I have a tacit agreement with my parish priest. I’ve been in the same parish for years. I think they don’t ask, and I don’t volunteer. I think what people are telling me is what I feel. Matter of fact the priest said it when I was in high school. He said there’s no one who can tell you you can’t receive because there’s no one who’s qualified to know.
My point here is not to cast stones, and I’m not qualified to do so anyway. My point also isn’t to quibble the esoteric laws of the Catholic church. His writer son, Andre Dubus III, experienced and documented the elder Andre’s failures as a husband and a father and was somehow able to forgive him. And regarding esoteric rules, our own culture is full of them, unwritten, and some spring-loaded like a snare. Yet we have no universal rites in which to ask and offer forgiveness. We’re often immobilized, offender and offended alike.
Returning to the morning when Dubus attended his first Mass after six months in the hospital. The priest implored the people to pray that their sacrifice would be acceptable to the Lord, the same people who earlier had entered and beaten their breasts, lamenting their sins. Dubus’ stories portrayed people caught up in their own personal litanies of sins, yet were capable of transcendence, a glimmering of grace in their small, ordinary acts of love. Characters who— whether they’re aware of their own shortcomings or not—hope that that their sacrifice would be acceptable to God.
Spiritual outcome of Andre Dubus 's being hit by a car is inspirational. Thank you Seth!