Dubus Andre Dubus\'s Meditations From a Movable

Dubus

Andre Dubus's Meditations From a Movable Chair

The title of Andre Dubus' nonfiction book of spiritual reflections reflects the fact that the author now is stranded in a wheelchair, having lost his mobility in a tragic accident. Ironically, his lost was incurrent when he was extending an act of charity. Dubus was helping some people by the side of the road who were experiencing car trouble, in the effort, he himself was hit by a car. In attempting to make this profound life adjustment, to living life as a 'differently abled' individual from living as a mobile, healthy man, Dubus discusses his new life through the metaphors of the Catholic Church. A father, a divorcee, and a Catholic, his relationship to the Church became conflicted over the course of his adult, he said, but is still present.

One of the three metaphors, along which he structures his text, is that of the "Sacraments." (Dubus 85-93) The section of the book entitled, "Sacraments," discusses the actual receiving of the Host. The Catholic Mass uses the Host as a religious sacrament of food and drink. The sacraments are not simply holy, though. Through these physical, apparently humble connections with the divine the mundane and the spiritual world become interconnected. Bread and wine are present in our everyday lives. Yet through the blessings of God and his priest, and through the ritual presentation of the mundane, individuals can achieve a spiritual connection with the divine every time they attend a Mass.

This spiritual connection is not simply one of the adherent's mental conditions. The very essence of the sacraments is a physical connection as well, commemorating and symbolizing Christ's giving of his human body for humanity's sins. Christ is both divine and spiritual and human and physical. The concept of transubstantiation, or the actual presence of Christ in the mundane matter of the Mass' sacraments is a further example of his miraculous ability to be two things simultaneously, and the miraculous ability of the divine to manifest itself in the ordinary.

Thus one must never reject the ordinary, muses Dubus. Dubus connects, through his own lived experience, the experience of the sacraments, the terrible act of his loss of his mobility and the equally, though supposedly more mundane secular function of making sandwiches for his children. Dubus experiences this act of cooking both as a pleasure and as a pain, which is appropriate because the sacraments themselves are interwoven with pleasure and with pain, with the pleasure of God's love for humanity and his divine father, but also the pain of the sacrifice of Jesus' life as nourishment for a fallen humanity.

As Dubus makes lunch for his daughters, the phone rings. This causes him great inner pain because he realizes that he cannot live his life in the body he used to live, and move in a free and easy way. Yet preparing the food also allows him to nurture the children in a way that does not require complete use of his legs. He thanks God for the gift of "my being alive" to receive the gifts he has been given, and to give.