Dante and the Season of Lent: Reflection by Dr. Bill Brownsberger

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy begins, in part, with these words:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark

For the straightforward path had been lost…

I cannot well repeat how there I entered

So full was I of slumber at the moment

In which I had abandoned the true way

It would be an extravagant reach for me to say that I am bewildered like Dante, but it is still true that both Dante and I are bewildered.  Perhaps most of us, in fact, have rare moments of realization like the one he describes.  We realize that we have been asleep, or nearly so, and in the first discombobulated moments of wakefulness we wonder how we got to the place or state in which we find ourselves.  The sources of our somnolence are different, more complex than Dante’s; his soporifics were simpler than ours.  His venial vices were verbs other than “to Netflix.”  Nevertheless, we have a lot in common with Dante.  Common to all lost people is needing a way out.  Moving away from sleepy indifference requires a path and a guide.  For Dante this was a long voyage through Hell and Purgatory to Heaven with Vergil, most of the way, at the lead.  It’s hard even to want to take a similar path of our own since we have no Vergil, and since we somewhat enjoy being lost in the woods.  The shade of its canopy is a darkness that hides us from ourselves.  The light of Easter Morning is terrifying if we have not trivialized it, if we have understood its meaning at all.  By its light, even from the edge of the woods, we see the person we could be.  And the path to that that person overlaps, at least for a time, with our itinerary through Lent.

Dr. Bill Brownsberger is the Academic Dean and a professor of theology at Conception Seminary College.