A Divine Lent #3: Your soul is burdened with that cowardice


A daily reflection during Lent on Dante's The Divine Comedy.

 Dante's journey with Virgil is delayed at the start of Canto 2 of Inferno due to Dant's self-doubting.

...O poet come to guide me,
tell me if you think my worth sufficient
before you trust me to this arduous road...

But why am I to go? Who allows me to?
I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul,
neither I nor any man would think me worthy;

and so, if I should undertake the journey,
I fear it might turn out an act of folly...

Virgil quickly diagnoses Dante's problem,

...your soul is burdened with that cowardice
which often weighs so heavily on a man,
it turns him from a noble enterprise
like a frightened beast that shies at its own shadow.

Dante's nod to Aeneas harkens to Virgil and before him Homer's admiration of warriors who put confidence in themselves, their own worth, sometimes successfully and sometimes folly.    Many times you have to read pages of stories of past fame and glory before a warrior flings himself head-on into an overwhelming enemy.  It doesn't always work.

Virgil sets Dante free of his fear not by telling him how great his worth, but rather by telling him of the acts of love by Beatrice, Lucia, and Mary concerned about his well being.  Drawing the personal parallel for Lent, I am not on this journey because I am worthy, I am on this journey because I am loved.

The Bible is full of stories of people such as Moses who questioned their worth when called by God.  Those stories show that our insecurities while very real do not prevent the accomplishment of the task at hand as long as we proceed despite those self-doubts.  Faith is the state of acting in the face of those insecurities because we know that we are loved.

How many times in a given week or day am I guilty of cowardice, by not being bold, by not addressing a need, by keeping my focus on only my well-being?

May we all experience the action of faith as a response to love received as Dante did at the end of this canto,

I entered on that deep and rugged road.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Flour Water Salt Yeast

Image
Four simple ingredients can entice all four senses when properly handled.   Michael Pollan's 2016 Netflix mini-series Cooked got me interested in making traditional, rustic bread, specifically Episode 3: Air.  Ken Forkish' 2012 book with the same title as this blog entry taught me how.  The method is straight-forward and requires one other crucial ingredient:  time.  Forkish presents two-loaf recipes which I half to keep my carb intake and waistline under some semblance of control.  I'll walk you through the creation of this loaf of Overnight 40% Whole Wheat Bread. The process starts with flour, a 60/40 split of all-purpose and whole wheat.  Forkish is big on baking with a scale rather than cups due to the variations across brands of flour.  Digital scales that measure in grams are cheap.  Get one.  Another fun thing about this method is that the main utensil used is your hand for all mixing.  Wash them. The water comes n...
Read more

The Illusion of Indispensability

I was talking with a colleague last week who stated that I don't miss a thing.  I responded that in reality I do; I just make sure that I don't appear to miss anything.  The comment made me recall an article from early in my career whose title stuck with me: Creating the Illusion of Indispensability by John Roush.  The article appeared in a long lost (?) journal Business Horizons in their September-October 1984 edition. I was a 24 year-old Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey.  As a young, energetic Systems Engineer I would comb through a monthly circulated list of recently published articles, checking off the ones I wanted to read, looking for the secret of success.  This one caught my eye. Roush, then Executive Assistant to the President of the University of Richmond, stated the dichotomy of our professional life, "All of us want to believe that we are important, really important....Juxtaposed against o...
Read more

Hoping no one has to ask the question "Will they like me?"

Delivered Sunday, February 25, 2018, at First Presbyterian Church, Urbana, Illinois Twenty years ago, we were good consumers.  Having just moved to town, Shari and I with three small girls in tow spent almost a full year church shopping.  We visited many churches across multiple denominations critiquing each.  Did we like the sermon? What did we think of the pastor? Did we like the music? How was the church school? What did we think of the people?  Eventually, despite our well-honed consumerism, the “did we like?” questions turned into “how could we see ourselves serving?” questions.  In the end, we were called into this community. Throughout that entire process, one question never came to mind.  I never asked myself, “Will they like me?”  It literally never occurred to me.  You could say it was ego, or maybe it just comes with being part of the dominant socio-economic group.  It just never occurred to me.  It’s a church!  Of c...
Read more