“STUB” AS
SPIRITUAL METAPHOR:
Like Andy Catlett in Wendell Berry’s
novel Remembering, each of us has a
“stub” of some kind. In a stupid accident for which he could not forgive
himself, Andy lost his right hand in a corn harvesting machine. After that, he
lived with a sense of not being whole. Who doesn’t?
“He raged, and he raged
at his rage, and nothing that he had was what he wanted.” Because he could not
accept his “stub,” Andy thought, erroneously, that others could not accept him.
At the edge of his anger at everything and everyone else was his anger at
himself. And so, Flora, his wife, said to him one day:
“Do
you know what you need?”
“What?”
“Forgiveness.
And I want to forgive you. All of us do. And you need more than ours. But you must
forgive yourself.”
Each
of us has a “stub” of some kind, some physical deformity, some emotional scar,
some public moral failure, or some clandestine sin. It weighs us down like
concrete. No day passes that we do not think about our “stubs,” those marks
that make us unacceptable to ourselves.
And, of course, if we do not find a way to restore joy to our stubby
lives, we will live joylessly because of a deep, deep anger toward ourselves.
Beyond the forgiveness of God and the forgiveness of others lies the really
hard work of forgiving ourselves.
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