Stretching

As we take those glorious stretches of limbs so long compressed and cramped by wintery days and nights, we might as well stretch our minds as well. After all, it is Lent, and, alas, we still have work to do. 

How about a stretch into the world of Dante? Yes, that Dante, he of the Divine Comedy, the grand poet of whom another great poet, T.S. Eliot wrote: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”  

I recently attended a lecture entitled “Why Dante Matters” given by the brilliant Dante scholar, Dr. John Took. I apologize for only being able to bring forth brief insights from my notes in the space we have here as Dr. Took apologized for even attempting to present so colossal a figure as Dante in an hour. “Don’t take my word for it!” he kept urging us, “Go to the source!” even after the spectacular particles of penetrating analysis he was in the midst of presenting. I urge you to do the same. Especially during Lent, it’s truly worth the journey and, surprisingly, not that daunting. If I can do it, you can!

In essence, Dante matters because of the depth of his insight into human existence. It is he who most brilliantly affirms that most human power: self-determination. It is he who also confirms, in light of that power, just how difficult it is to be human: We connive in our own undoing and experience Inferno or Hell as a result; we trudge up endless mountains striving to be good, struggling to reconstruct our moral lives and to bring love to each other in a life of Purgatorio or Purgatory. And then, after all that and only after all of that, we drink in the abundance of grace and “Love Enlightened” that is Paradiso.  Imagine all of the above described in magnificent poetry. No, don’t imagine; go to the source!

The journey Dante takes us on is our life journey (rather than, in Catholic interpretation, afterlife one), and we are never alone. He is our companion as Virgil and Beatrice are his. The sojourn begins with our being lost in what I would call a Lenten world in which we can see the sunlight ahead but are trapped below and can take no shortcut out. We must first plumb the depths of the depravity all around us, fully see its magnitude, let those within it tell us their stories and describe their agony. But even then we are not finished. After we have absorbed what we have discovered there, after we have let it expand our consciousness, we can finally go on, but only to “purgatory”. There we will confront lives spent much like our own and, with new clarity, uncover the significance of our existential day to day choices. 

Purgatory is profoundly Lenten. It is where we recognize and pay our debts to all we have harmed, where we take on the arduousness of reordering our lives. No easy moralism is permitted if we are to succeed, no superficial loving, including of ourselves. It’s really our “selves” watching over ourselves as we reconstruct our existence, performing difficult tasks, meeting challenges, learning, expanding, growing in integrity and attaining wisdom despite tremendous pressures. No wonder Dante celebrates our courage. He recognizes us as star-seekers and knows we will eventually take wings. 

And then there is Paradise. Dante believed we all possess a primordial dimension of immense love, love bestowed on us by our very existence. Our life journeys are full of calls to harvest that love and to combine it with all love around us so that we can come to know “love divine”. Those who are in Hell have delivered themselves to proximate love only. They have relegated the divine to depravation. They have been unjust to their just selves. Dante shows us in the innermost circle of Hell the most dire consequence of these actions: Souls there are encrusted in ice, forever unable to move, forever unable to communicate, their lives devoid of life, disconnected from all, forever isolated. 

Paradise brings ultimate connection, the result of our uplifting by nature, by our expansive experiences of life and love, by our sufferings, and ultimately by grace. Paradise is not some great “unknown”, something utterly “other” or “magical” but recognizable as our destiny, as our home, where there is no more pain-filled isolation but great and enduring presence and a now internally operating grace. No wonder there is such rejoicing. 

In his works, Dante has called us to open ourselves to a great expansiveness of our internal and external lives. He calls us to redraw ourselves more spaciously, to lose ourselves to find ourselves, to undo our lives to rebuild them again, to experience both annihilation and affirmation, to enlarge life and increase love exponentially. 

The Lenten part of the story stretches us. But then comes Easter and we are there. 

Thank you, Dr. Took, and, oh yes, Dante, for this message.