Don’t throw this away! Save it! Put it in your “for-when-I-am-going-to-need-it” file.

Here’s poet John Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s opening words to his “Divine Comedy.” As you may know, Dante understood the spiritual life better than most.

Dante’s pilgrim is the subject of the poem’s beginning. He is in the midst of a deep depression:

 

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from

the straight road and woke to find myself alone in

a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank,

so arduous a wilderness!

Its very memory gives shape to fear.

Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!

But since it came to good, I will recount all that

I found revealed there by God’s grace.

 

Dante’s pilgrim’s experience may not be yours … at least not right now. Still, something like what Christians have named “the dark night of the soul” happens to many folk who spend a lifetime tracking God.

This depression or “dark wood” is often associated with life’s setbacks — some failure, an inability to handle conflictive feelings, an issue of health, loneliness, or mourning for what we haven’t been and might yet be.

It may be just something that happens at this time of the year. Whatever it is, let the “wilderness” of Dante’s poem be our word for it.

Right at the beginning of the poem, Dante intimates that the pilgrim discovers an unexpected “good” in the “dark wood.”

What he learns is that in that wood God also waits. In the very place where we are ambushed by setback God waits, assuming the role of midwife to new possibility.

It may be a new and more discerning self that issues from our experience in the “dark wood.” Possibly, it is that we discover afresh that God is indeed involved in our lives in ways beyond our comprehension, common and humdrum though they may be.

Setback and depression, though painfully oppressive spiritually, are often the most dynamic and beneficial times of life. The Russian writer Dostoevsky once said: “One has to be a bit ill to really feel alive.”

Just so! As people of faith, we are persuaded that God can and does guard and lead us through those days when we are beset by depression and setback. A safe passage to the other side of the “dark wood” entails our trusting that God will bring us safely through to a new mental and spiritual standing place.

It is what caused Dante to say, “But since it came to good, I will recount all that I found revealed there by God’s grace.”

January and February may be that time of year when a kind of malaise settles upon us. It appears to be common to the human experience.

There is a “high” and a “low” road. Though we may wish to avoid doing so, every person on occasion seems bound to stray onto the “low” road that inevitably goes through the “dark wood.”

However, Dante would have us know that there is often an unexpected “good” that comes should we find ourselves in the “dark wood.” That “good” could be anything that reorients our perspective, or launches us in a new and more rewarding way of living.

We might even discover that we can live with our imperfect selves in a flawed world, knowing that God’s grace and compassion extends to us at all stages of our life’s journey.

Dante’s thoughts about the “dark wood” are worthy of our reflections. We might be wise to put them in our knapsacks.

 

Fear Not, I am with you, oh, be not dismayed,

for I am your God, I will still give you aid;

I’ll strengthen you, help you and cause you to stand

Upheld by my gracious, omnipotent hand.

From “How Firm a Foundation,” New Century Hymnal

The Rev. Merle G. Steva is minister of visitation at First Parish Church in Saco.

 

Copy the Story Link