A graceful man: Andre Dubus, 1936-1999.

HE DIED LAST winter, his heart failing him at home on a hill above , Massachusetts Merrimack River, and his death at age 62 robbed this nation of its finest Catholic writer. No one since Flannery O'Connor wrote with such grace and honesty of the power of faith in American lives, and I believe that no one in America ever wrote with such sinewy beauty of the sacrament of every moment and the stunning simple daily miracle of the Eucharist.

We can savor, with pleasure and respect, the work that Andre Dubus left behind at his early death--a novel, eight collections of stories, two extraordinary collections of essays--but we mourn the silence of a man who portrayed, as no one before or since, the struggles and joys of Catholic faith woven through American life.

There have been, and are, wonderful tellers of that tale: O'Connor, J. F. Powers, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy among those deceased; Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, James Carroll, and Paul Wilkes among those living. Powers' tales of rectory and monastery life are classics, but of fiction writers who have tried to show the heroic and haunted struggle for grace in daily life, I believe O'Connor and Dubus stand clear against the rest, and Dubus, like O'Connor, was also a deft and passionate essayist in later life.

Dubus' own life fell into two great watersheds: before and after the night of July 23, 1986. Before that hot night on a highway he was a writer known for his tales of people under pressure, admired for the honesty of his stories, the way they looked gently and respectfully at the lives of the poor, the tired, the troubled, especially in the tougher sections of the declining mill towns along Massachusetts' Merrimack River valley. Before that night he'd been a captain in the Marines, a Louisiana boy who'd arrived finally in New England to be a college teacher. He'd been married twice, blessed with five children, had another child on the way.

But then came that night on a highway.

Driving home, he stopped to help a young couple whose car had hit an abandoned motorcycle. As he helped them to the shoulder of the highway, a speeding car barreled into them, but Dubus--in an instant reaction he attributed to his Marine training--yanked the woman out of the way. She was injured only slightly, but the young man was killed, and Dubus' legs were smashed beyond repair.

For the next 13 years he lived in a wheelchair, and in that chair he conducted a brave and tender and difficult search for both the grace to live his own new life and ever more direct ways to write about courage under duress. And more and more he wrote about sacraments, about the miracle of every moment, about the grace of God he felt and tasted and savored everywhere he spun in his chair.

"A sacrament is physical, and within it is God's love," he wrote, "as a sandwich is physical, and nutritious and pleasurable, and within it is love, if someone makes it for you and gives it to you with love; even harried or tired or impatient love, but with love's direction and concern, love's again and again wavering and distorted focus on goodness; then God's love too is in the sandwich. On Tuesdays when I make lunches for my girls, I focus on this: The sandwiches are sacraments. Not the miracle of transubstantiation, but certainly parallel with it, moving in the same direction. If I could give my children my body to eat, again and again without losing it, my body like the loaves and fishes going endlessly into mouths and stomachs, I would do it."

Catholicism, perhaps more than any other faith, is story--the ocean of Jewish stories that provide context for the Messiah, the riveting stories Jesus told, the stories of Jesus' life, the stories of the millions of people who have believed in the Son of Light since he walked Judea, the stories we tell every day in the Mass, the stories we teach our children so that they too might yearn for and pursue light in darkness, grace amid brokenness. And Catholicism is paradox; it is the relentless belief, against horrible hourly evidence, that divine love made and sustains and graces the world and will do so unto the end. And Catholicism is rich in ritual and symbol, in characters and miracles and magic.

No wonder the faith lends itself easily to stories--Flannery O'Connor's fanatic believers, Powers' calculating priests, Dubus' openhearted yet rock-ribbed accounts of sacraments everywhere and in everyone.

A great American storyteller died in February, six children lost their father, and Dubus' town was reduced by an inimitable one. And Catholics in this nation lost one of their most articulate and sharp-eyed brothers, a burly-bearded man whose smile was nearly as big as his heart. His gifts were many, his courage in pain admirable, his grace an education. May he rest in peace in the palm of the Lord.

By BRIAN DOYLE, the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and author of Credo (St. Mary's Press, 1999), a collection of essays about faith, and, with his father, Jim, of two Voices (Liguori, 1996).