Meditations from a Movable Chair

Meditations from a Movable Chair. Essays by Andre Dubus. New York: Vintage Books (Random House), 1998. 210 pp. $23.00 (cloth); $12.00 (paper).

When one thinks of American authors, one does not often join the words "first-rate" and "Christian" as adjectives in front of the word "writer." Flannery O'Connor and T. S. Eliot come immediately to mind as authors who deserve the pairing; among the living one thinks of Reynolds Price and Wendell Berry. Add Andre Dubus to the list-all too short-of first-rate Christian writers in America. Now he is dead, and he deserves to be remembered in a Christian journal.

Dubus is best known for his Selected Stories (1988). After his death in the summer of 1999, his eulogist in the New York Times Book Review, a self acknowledged "secular reader," lamented the movement of religion from the background in Dubus's writings to the foreground, seeing in such change the concomitant loss of a "certain moral ambiguity." Ambiguity is important, even necessary, in literature, as it is in religion, but too much ambiguity leads to inertia and moral helplessness, Besides, Dubus did maintain a healthy ambiguity; one has only to read Dancing After Hours (1998), his final collection of short stories, to see-and feel-this.

Ambiguity, in fact, opens the present collection of essays. When Dubus's sister is raped outside her home, she tells her rapist "God bless you" while he rapes her. "I think of Christ," Dubus reflects, "nailed to wood, my sister spiked to the earth of her lawn." Later, Dubus's sister tells him that she would like to see the rapist castrated; she also prays fox the man at church and asks God to forgive him. When Dubus asks his sister what she would have done had the attacker raped her daughter, who was at her mother's home, she calmly replies, "I would have killed him." Dubus would later write a story about a woman savagely defending herself in her home. There is enough ambiguity here to sustain weeks of discussion in a course on moral theology.

The Times' secular reader is right, though; in Dubus's later writings ambiguity, though present, becomes secondary to a sacramental vision. Dubus tried to attend Mass daily, but was often unable to. "But I know that when I do not go to Mass, I am still receiving Communion, because I desire it; and because God is in me, as He is in the light, the earth, the leaf. . . . Not remembering that we are always receiving sacraments is an isolation the leaves do not have to endure: they receive and give, and they are green" (pp. 86-87). Dubus somehow conveys this sacramental grace with both profound understanding and understatement which together are profoundly moving; it seems that he manages this balance better in his essays than in his stories. When the balance is just right, as when Dubus reflects theologically on his sister's rape, he manages to express the deepest and most longed-for Christian truths with stark simplicity: "But one bright day her anger and hatred will burn to white ash, and she will forgive him, the rape will finally end, and the man will be truly gone, to wander in her past" (p. 9).

Dubus's later vision comes, in large part, from disability: it appears to be part of the human condition that often those who are most compassionate have been the most wounded. Dubus was hit by a car while assisting someone on the road late at night; he lost one leg and the use of the other and was in near-constant pain, confined to a wheelchair (the "Movable Chair" of the book's title). Yet Dubus's disability gave him over time, as his soul matured, the honest ability to empathize more deeply with others: "Pat [his first wife] must have been tired for years in her twenties, when our children were very young. I only think of this now because being in a wheel chair has made fatigue a part of my life I must outwit" (p. 110). Grounded in such physical awareness of others, Dubus learned to see others spiritually, with compassion and lack of judgment: "On the planet are people with whole and strong bodies, whose wounded spirits need the constant help that the quadriplegic needs for his body" (p. 155). Dubus bears hopeful witness that wounds can heal into more than scars.

Perhaps, after all, there is no ambiguity in a man who can sing, full of life, from a wheelchair while perambulating a church parking lot for exercise, pausing even to admire "the pure and fascinating" anger of an "unsound" man who, walking by the church, flips Dubus off and screams "Fuck God!": "On that morning under a blue November sky, it was beautiful to see and hear such belief" (p. 141). Or perhaps there is, in the singing of a person who has every right to be cursing, more ambiguity than the heart, or page, can bear. For the Christian reader, ambiguity or the transcending of ambiguity, deepens into mystery. Mystery, finally, contains all of ambiguity's fireworks and heroics but adds to it, thereby profoundly deepening it, the compassion and mercy that come with humility and without which we, like Dubus, have no cause to fight, or celebrate, but ourselves.