Fingerless Men

For although I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit, and I delight to see your orderly condition and firm faith in Christ" (Colossians 2:5 BSB)

My mom's grandfather, Dudley, lost a few of his fingers in a wagon wheel during The Depression. I remember visiting him and my great-grandmother Ruth in their small, darkly lit home in Newton, Illinois when I was barely old enough to talk. They were old, frail people. I don't remember if I ever saw them standing or walking. In my memory, they are permanently seated in two small recliners in their living room, Dudley on the left and Ruth on the right. I was never comfortable in the house. It was too quiet, too dark, too humid, and it smelled like old people. 

As an obedient young boy, I patiently sat on the carpeted floor of the living room while my mother made polite, adult conversation that was beyond my ability to appreciate. On the coffee table were a few trinkets to distract me. A snow globe. A dark wooden block with white sticks glued to it, spelling the name JESUS in relief. A Newton's Cradle, with small metal balls clicking back and forth. A bird balancing by its beak on a pillar. 

The conversation starters on the coffee table were interesting, but the most fascinating objects in the room were those that were missing: my great-grandpa's fingers. 

Most of the time, he kept his hand hidden, balled into a fist and buried in his lap. Despite having lived without fingers for 50 years or more, he always seemed quite self-conscious about his amputation. Throughout our visits, he kept them buried in his lap, a fingered hand wrapped around a fingerless fist. When we rose to leave, though, he would extend his hands toward me to bring me toward his embrace. I remember feeling one hand beneath each armpit as he raised me toward himself. Even my ribs knew that part of his embrace was missing. Although I believed there was nothing to fear in him, I could not help but dread what was missing in him.

What is a man without fingers? 

My young mind was not capable of framing such questions, but in retrospect, I am certain that this is the type of question I was asking myself. How could it be possible to live without fingers, and what could it possibly mean?

If a man could live without fingers, could he also live without toes? Without arms? Without a head?

If a man is not his fingers, what is he?

Dudley died when I was nine years old, and I learned that a corpse does not look like the man who inhabited it. In fact, it was difficult for me to recognize the dead body as the same man who had lived his entire life--as far as I had known, anyway--seated in a recliner in a living room in Newton, Illinois, fumbling with balancing toys on the coffee table with fingerless hands. No, he certainly did not look like himself, and the only way I could tell for certain that he was the same man was to inspect the stubs at the end of his arms. 

Yes, it was his body after all. I recognized it not from what I could see, but rather, from what was missing. 

Decades earlier, Dudley had lost a few of the fingers on his right hand. I have no idea what happened to them. I am sure that they were tossed into a wastebasket at a hospital, or perhaps lost along the side of the road where the accident had occurred. I never heard the story in detail. By the time I arrived, his fingers had long since vanished into the earth, returning to dust. But for many years after the accident, the rest of Dudley had remained intact. 

However, as I peered into the casket where Dudley's body had been laid, it became obvious to me that Dudley had lost not only his fingers but his body, too. There were Dudley's arms, his chest, and even his head, but Dudley was nowhere to be found. 

To be honest, I never really knew Dudley. I never felt a paternal bond of any sort, nor did I feel any grand sense of loss at his funeral. For starters, he wasn't really related to me. My mother's biological grandfather had died when she was a small girl, and her grandmother had remarried Dudley. I had no way of understanding any of those facts when I was a child, but I suppose that I must have perceived through the nonverbal communication of my mother that Dudley, while kind, was not a blood relative. Anyway, I did not visit him often. Maybe a half-dozen times. Perhaps twice that many. I can't be sure. However, any time I did see Dudley, it was in the same context: the living room, the trinkets, the fingerless hands. 

For all of these reasons, Dudley's presence in my life has served primarily to teach me something about the difference between life and death--the difference between the not-body and the body, in a manner that must have been deeply impactful to the developing consciousness of a curious preadolescent boy.  I am grateful that in one of my early encounters with death, I could process its significance from a perspective that was much more metaphysical than relational. He was a man I knew, but he was not a man I loved, so when I witnessed him in state at the funeral parlor, it was not so much the man about whom I was concerned, but the body.

As I stood by his coffin, my mother was standing beside me. She placed her hands on his and said, "To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." It was a phrase she had learned from her father. A phrase he had borrowed from Saint Paul's letter to the Corinthians. I was told that Dudley was in Heaven with Jesus, that he had left his body on Earth. I could not fathom this mystery, but even at nine years old, I understood that there was one way to comprehend it. The way of all mankind: I, too, must walk through the valley of shadows.

With my hands holding the side of the coffin, I peered over the side of the metal box lined with ivory linen. My eyes fixed themselves upon Dudley's closed eyelids as I contemplated my mother's words. With the faith of a child, I could not help but conclude that if absence from the body is paradise, then death must be welcomed. Still, I could not fathom the loss of my fingers, whether in life or death. The longer I live with this body, though, the more I come to know that it does not live with me. It is a body of death, and I rejoice to know that I have already been set free from its fingerless grip.

Forty years later, in quiet contemplation of the mystery of Christ, I better understand where Dudley has gone, for I am already with him. The child within this body knows that he already has been crucified with Christ and no longer lives, for all who have accepted Christ are seated with him in heavenly places. The Bible says that though we walk in the flesh, we no longer recognize anyone according to the flesh--not even Jesus. So why do we choose to see ourselves situated there? 

When we are apart from our bodies, we are together in the spirit. There is no need to wait for a funeral to be together in the Spirit. As I learn to know that my fingers are already dust, I find myself walking with you in the light of God. For all who walk with Christ have already passed through death. We already possess eternal life. Or perhaps, He possesses us. 

If He is with us to the ends of the earth, then we are also with Him. 

If you are with Him, and if I am with Him, then you and I are together, too, always holding hands with fingers that cannot be seen.