Among much to read and consider this Holy Saturday and Easter weekend, I commend to readers Rod Dreher's wonderful and searingly honest essay in today's Wall Street Journal, wherein he discusses Dante's Divine Comedy and the profound ways it helped him through a very difficult time of his life. Dreher notes:
Midway through my own life, my journey brought me back to my hometown, where, in the wake of my sister's death, I had hoped to start anew with my family. The tale of my sister Ruthie's grace-filled fight with cancer and the love of our hometown that saw her through to the end changed my heart—and helped to heal wounds from the teenage traumas that had driven me away.
But things didn't work out as I had expected or hoped. By last fall, I found myself struggling with depression, confusion and chronic fatigue—caused, according to my doctors, by deep and unrelenting stress. My rheumatologist told me that I had better find some way to inner peace or my health would be destroyed.
In the midst of those troubles, Dreher turned to Dante, and he writes that he "was left awe-struck by the power of this 700-year-old poem to restore me."
I won't do justice to it by excerpting it here, so click here to read it in full. It's outstanding, and filled with good thoughts for spiritual renewal.
