‘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!

It is so bitter, death is hardly more –

But to reveal the good that came to me,

I shall relate the other things I saw…’

In the opening lines of Inferno, Dante finds himself lost, bewildered by winding trails in a ‘dark wilderness’, beset by wild beasts and blinded by fear.  Suddenly, he sees a man standing before him on the path.  Dante cries out to the man for help – the man comes closer and introduces himself as Virgil – not a mortal man but a shade – a soul.

He tells Dante that there is no way around these vicious beasts, but that Dante must follow him on another path – one that leads through the infernal regions, up the mountain of Purgatory, and, if he wishes, through the heavenly realm.

Setting out on Ash Wednesday along the path that leads through the season of lent may seem like the start of a dark and difficult journey which though necessary is perhaps one which, like Dante, we’d rather not have to take.

Lent is, I think, much like Dante’s journey, an opportunity of extraordinary grace to take a journey out of the way of life and bad habits we’ve fallen into.  Just as the many souls in the eternal regions comment on the extraordinary grace given to Dante to undertake the journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven before his mortal life is over, so Lent also offers us a chance to review the direction we are walking in, and to re-orient our steps toward the great final goal.

Fr James Kubicki says in his youtube video for Ash Wednesday that receiving the ash on our foreheads and remembering that we are dust and unto dust we shall return is really to face the reality of life; and that we may indeed be made from dust, but we are not intended for earth – we have a far greater eternal goal to work for.  So also, reading Dante is like receiving a whack on the side of the head – although it is of course fiction, it forces you to consider reality, and the importance of living life well while we are still on Earth.

In Pope Benedict’s message for Lent 2012, he says:

“The spiritual masters remind us that in the life of faith those who do not advance inevitably regress. Dear brothers and sisters, let us accept the invitation, today as timely as ever, to aim for the “high standard of ordinary Christian living” (Novo Millennio Ineunte, 31).”

And just to stretch the Dante metaphor a little further, like Dante, it wouldn’t hurt to take a famous literary or theological mind from the past to be our shadowy guide along the way in our journey through this season of Lent.

‘“Poet,” I said to him, “I beg of you,

by that same God you never knew, 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, and those

You say are dwelling in such misery.”

He set on, and I held my pace behind.’

 

- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto I