“Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.”
So begins the famous opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy – written between 1308 – 1321.
Six months ago eight of us began a journey together. The idea sprang up during a Seder meal one Saturday evening. A friend from church asked a fellow community member, both of whom were sharing the Seder with us, “What’s your favorite book?” Always a leading question. When the answer to the query came back as Dante, the idea was launched – what if we started a book club to aid each other on a likely challenging pilgrimage through Dante’s classic trilogy on hell, purgatory, and paradise?
Our group spans different stages of life and generations – a couple in their seventies representing the Baby Boomers, a couple in their fifties standing in for Gen X, my husband and I in our late thirties as the Millennials, and finally, newlyweds in their early twenties, rounding us out with Gen Z. The group comprises three Catholics and five Protestants and an amicable openness to discussing our theological differences with grace and good humor, despite our strong convictions. Each couple has taken a turn hosting dinner, after which we circle up for conversation and spiral down Canto by Canto into the nether regions of Dante’s descent into hell.
Discussion is lively as we consider Dante’s understanding of and approach to the variety and implications of human sin. For instance, why does he put lust in the first circle of hell and treachery in the last? Not exactly how things were emphasized in my Sunday School upbringing.
And what might in modern times align with the sin of divination? Turns out, by our interpretation anyway, we moderns are constantly trying to tell and control what the future will hold, albeit “mathematically” or “scientifically.”
And really, what are we supposed to think about the sin of usury – lending money at interest – which happens to underpin our entire modern economic system? A particularly poignant question as one of our group members works in a bank and six of the eight of our names are signed on mortgages. We certainly don’t come up with all the answers, but the discussion is always fruitful, thought-provoking, and personally convicting (although as of yet, none of us have fully sworn off usury.)
At our fifth session, we made it to the end of Dante’s descent through hell and are eager for a brighter upturning ahead. But before making that turn, at nearly the deepest point of the pit of hell, Dante comes upon three giants. The imagery was initially elusive to the group, who or what are these giants? But a note by the translator, Dorothy Sayers, was both enlightening and arresting, if you’ll humor me to quote it at length:
“The Giants who rebelled against Jove typify the pride of Satan who rebelled against God. But they may also, I think, be taken as the images of the blind forces which remain in the soul, and in society, when the ‘general bond of love’ is dissolved and the ‘good of the intellect’ wholly withdrawn, and when nothing remains but blocks of primitive mass-emotion …one may call [the three giants] the doom of nonsense, violence, and triviality, overtaking a civilization in which the whole natural order is abrogated.”
Here the ancient seems particularly relevant, dare I say descriptive even, of our current day.
“So,” I queried the group, “what does one do in the face of a culture that seems to be, day by day, being overtaken by nonsense, violence, and triviality? How to rebuild the general bond of love and the good of the intellect against primitive mass-emotion?”
Our answers trickled in slowly. Make real food. Go outside. Do something creative, knitting or woodworking perhaps. Wendell Berry would say, go and weed your garden. Make music together. Invest in real things instead of virtual things, especially real relationships with real people in real time. Or in other words, build community. Read old books. Even better, read old books and grapple with them with real people in real time while building real relationships. And delicious real food always helps, of course.
The next morning in church, our pastor preached on 1 Timothy 3, a passage famous for its description that
“all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.”
1 Timothy 3:10-17
Timothy is faced with a reality which Paul describes as being filled with “evildoers and impostors [who] will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” The passage and sermon seemed eerily reminiscent of our Dante discussion from the night before, making one wonder if our modern era is really all that unique or just a perpetuation of the ongoing working out of sin in humanity, from Adam to Paul to Dante to today.
How then, shall we live? How, again, to fight back against nonsense, violence, and triviality in our day to day? Reading THE Book of course, that trains us for righteousness with its teaching, rebuking, and correcting. And as we seek to live in righteousness, I might also humbly suggest to get your hands dirty with something real, like a garden or slow cooked food or woodworking. To not shy away from people who don’t think exactly the same as you do or the real messiness of non-virtual relationships that can’t be canceled and blocked.
And while you’re at it, try picking up an old book, and if it would help you to make sense of it and complete the journey, invite a few friends along for the pilgrimage. You never know what joy and beauty you might find along the way.
Top image credit: An allegorical portrait of Dante, holding a Canto from the Divine Comedy and facing Purgatory in the distance, painted by Agnolo Bronzino, dated 1532-1533. Painting is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. USA. Image is in the public domain.
Sarah is a wife, and mother to four kids. She grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan USA, studied English and French at the University of Michigan (go Blue!), and now lives in Grand Rapids Michigan, where she and her husband David help lead a Christian community. In what spare time she can find, Sarah enjoys experimental cooking, gardening, playing Scrabble, being outside, and reading good children’s literature.