Dante and Me             Meditation 1

 

One of the most valuable books that I have ever read … and which I reread often, constantly discovering new insights … is The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. It is regarded as a great masterpiece of literature and social commentary. Along with Shakespeare and Cervantes, Dante is the root inspiration of existential philosophy.

 

The opening words contain a metaphor pregnant with meaning. I thought of them when I suggested the concept of “cultural wilderness” in the book Growing Spiritual Redwoods (with Bill Easum).

 

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

for I had lost the path that does not stray.

 

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

that savage forest, dense and difficult,

which even in recall renews my fear:

 

so bitter – death is hardly more severe!

But to retell the good discovered there,

I’ll also tell the other things I saw.

 

(I will always quote from the Everyman edition translated by Allen Mandelbaum).

 

We all know that Dante describes his spiritual journey from damnation to redemption through various stages of Inferno and Purgatorio and Paradiso. The journey is a template for the tribulations, yearnings, and aspirations of people today … lost as they are in the same wilderness, unable to find … and for postmoderns, even to believe in … “the path that does not stray”.

 

Apart from the Bible, I find The Divine Comedy to be the most significant guide for spiritual life in all literature. I do not make that statement lightly. I still value reading the antenicene and postnicene fathers, the protestant reformers, Ignatius, Wesley, Martin Luther King Jr., any many more contemporary authors. But nobody captures the journey to redemption like Dante.

 

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