Losing the Way

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark wilderness, 

For I had wandered from the straight and true.

How hard a thing it is to tell about,

That wilderness so savage, dense, and harsh

Even to think of it renews my fear!

- Dante Alighieri, Inferno (Canto I, line 1-6)

Since last year, Timothy Lawrence and I adopted the tradition to read and discuss Dante’s Divine Comedy throughout the Lenten fast. This reading course was outlined by Fr. Hayden a few years prior for his students at Pacifica. As if enduring the silence and temptations of Lent are not enough, adding a medieval poetry epic about the 9 circles of hell, 7 levels of purgatory, and 9 spheres of heaven to that is a good penance. During the first few chapters, there is an emphasis on losing the way. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, Lent reveals much about ourselves. Our fears. Our worries. Our anxiety.

In the final days before Ash Wednesday, we know what we’re fasting from. Rather than slowly weaning off what we will fast from, however, we may hold on tightly to them until Lent arrives. We want to absorb it all as much as possible before giving up entirely, thus revealing how much of a reliance or need we have on them. 

Without those attachments, we feel hollow. Even more, when we have more time to pray, we also realize we made so little time to pray beforehand. We all want to change for the better in our prayers and time with God. However, the irony is that we also want to remain completely untouched in our comforts. As I mentioned a few weeks ago in my pre-lent blog post, God wants to invade our comforts to help us grow where we are lacking or are in need. To quote Bp. Scarlett from his homily on the First Sunday After Christmas:

“Change requires disruption, which is experienced as a movement from comfort to challenge. This requires expanded vision. We must be willing to look beyond the momentary discomfort and pray for grace to see the larger redemptive purposes of God in our lives.”

The disruption here in Lent recognizes how much our prayer life is off balance. More importantly, it reveals to us how much our distractions have had a grasp on our lives.

This is my third year in a row giving up social media, which is pretty rough when you run a Christian meme page. What I have come to realize more and more is how much social media has had a grasp over my life of prayer. Given my situation being out of state, sitting in the silence in my prayers away from my close friends and family has led to a lot of vulnerable prayers to where I am exhausted. With this along with everything going on in my personal life and my fiancée’s, it felt as if we couldn't have a moment's rest while life got progressively harder. With social media gone, my prayers became emotional as I noticed more and more how far off the path I was. Similar to Dante, I don’t know where, when, or how I strayed from it. And so I began to face despair. 

In that first Chapter of Inferno, Dante faces futility and despair after coming across wild animals that were scary beyond belief. As he quotes:

So heavily she (the She-Wolf) weighed my spirit down,

Pressed me by the terror of her glance, 

I lost all hope to gain the mountaintop.

And as a gambler, winning with a will,

Happening on the time when he must lose,

Turns all his thoughts into despair,

So I by that relentless beast, who came

Against me step by step, and drove me back, 

To where the sun is silent evermore.

(Canto I, line 52-60)

In Lent and elsewhere, we may feel this despair when we cry out like Dante, “Mercy upon me, mercy!” But our story with Dante doesn’t end here (if it did, that would be one short poem). Within the midst of despair, Dante finds hope in the Poet Virgil who was sent to bring him out of the lost way. To do so, however, Dante has to endure the 9 layers of hell and then more through Purgatory before reaching the Heavens. 

Of course, this is a work of fiction. That said, Fr. Hayden’s reading guide for it has led to many personal questions of my life. It started with, “How far have I strayed from the path?” and has led to, “How far am I willing to go to get back on the path?” How much are we willing to surrender to be brought back? How much of “hell”  are we willing to endure? When Dante is told by Virgil about the journey ahead and how much it would take to endure, Dante takes him up on the journey ahead despite the unknown and the questions he has (and boy, does Dante have a lot of questions). 

In Lent, we may have lost the way. We may have recognized how off course we were in our life of prayer. We may have been on the brink of despair and exhaustion. We may have even fallen back into habits of distraction or desires. But like Dante, we recognize the errors of our ways and work to the path. The only question that remains is: “Are willing to endure the hardship to find the path again?”

‘Poet,’ I said to him, ‘I beg of you …

that I may flee this evil and the worse to come, 

Lead me now to the place you tell me of,

So I may see Saint Peter’s gate.’

…

He set on, and I held my place behind.

(Canto I, line 130, 232-134, 136)