A Divine Lent #15: To look back means to go back out again


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

 Good news!  Dante finally enters purgatory in the ninth canto.  One would think that after enduring eight cantos in antepurgatory, the pilgrim would be able to endure one last arduous climb to meet his immediate goal.  No.  While sleeping an angel, Lucia, lifts him from the valley to a spot just outside purgatory's gate.

Lucia, or St. Lucy, was known as the patron saint of those with impaired vision.  Appropriately Dante soon finds his own vision inadequate when approaching the guard at the gate.

I slowly raised my eyes: I saw that he
was sitting on the highest step, his face
too splendid for my eyes-I looked away!

And in his hand he held a naked sword;
so dazzling were the rays reflected thence,
each time I tried to look I could not see.

Just as Dante could not visually grasp this heavenly sights, how quick I am to play the cynic, to not take goodness at face value, but assume there's more to the story.  There's always another shoe that will drop.  How much goodness am I blind to because of my inability to see it?

Dante's response is a model, approach goodness with contrition.  He receives the seven P's as scars on his brow for peccatum, the Latin word for sin, and is instructed that he will wash off these scars as he ascends the mountain.  As the guard opens the door, he advises:

"Enter," he said to us, "but first be warned:
to look back means to go back out again."

Sight can become not just an impairment, but detrimental.  The look back of Lot's wife in Genesis didn't slow down her journey, it ended it.  When I am unable to focus on what is good, but tempted more to look back at my own interests, the impairment becomes even greater.

May we this Lent strive to focus our vision on what is good.

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