A Divine Lent #40: You know Whose light it was that lifted me

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

At the end of Purgatory, Dante declared he was ready to rise to the stars.  In the opening canto of Volume 3: Paradise, he does so.  Standing with Beatrice in Earthly Paradise, he observes her staring intensely into the sun, the divine light.  Her gaze inspired him to do the same.  As light shining downward causes a reflection back up, he felt himself transformed.  Something was happening.

Whether it was the last created part

of me alone that rose, O Sovereign Love,

You know Whose light it was that lifted me.

Dante did not sprout wings and fly on his own.  He was lifted.  He heard the music of the spheres of heaven, and he saw the sphere of fire which in Dante's worldview separated the earth and air from the heavens.  Every experience fed his eagerness and curiosity.  Pursuit of the divine light leads to a greater, deeper pursuit.  I can imagine Dante accelerating his rise with his eagerness.

The revelation of this light, this sound,

inflamed me with such eagerness to learn

their cause, as I had never felt before.

Dante is a mechanic.  He always wants to know how things work, an explanation:  how can shades feel hunger? How can two streams be at the very top of Mount Purgatory? How can he be rising?  Is it just his soul that's rising, or is it his real body?  Dante's questions continue to be roadblocks for him.  If he can't get an explanation, his mind is tied down in the question.  Beatrice senses his curiosity.

"You have yourself to blame for burdening

your mind with misconceptions that prevent

from seeing clearly what you might have seen."

Dante has confessed his sins and received divine grace, but he is still limited by his preconceptions of how things should work.  He has yet to open himself to a different understanding of the universe. He wants to use his own framework for explaining what he sees rather than considering an entirely new frame of reference.  Constraining God with our view of how things should works is fallacy.

Beatrice enlightens Dante on how the universe reflects the divine order of its Creator.  Part of that order is that once shed of our encumbrances, humankind is drawn to God.  Dante has shed his old skin; his purgation is complete.  Of course he was rising!

You should, in all truth, be no more amazed

at your flight up than at the sight of water

that rushes down a mountain to its base.

If you, free as you are of every weight,

had stayed below, then that would be as strange

as living flame on earth remaining still.

Dante's journey had freed him from the burdens separating him from God. It was light that lifted him, a natural return to his Creator.  I hear strains of the gospel hymn, "Love Lifted Me."  "I was sinking deep in sin, ...sinking to rise no more, ... from the waters (love) lifted me, now safe am I."  Lent is the season where we seek to shed those weights, seek to find divine light.  Yet we do not rise on our own.  God raises us.

As sun sets on Lent and the light of Easter dawn breaks the horizon, may we all be lifted by the Light, be lifted by God's love.