Welcome to Part II of my three part reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy. My goal is to offer a modern reflection on each of the Comedia’s three books and share some insights into Dante’s brilliant and profound epic poem. I’ve headlined this post with a 2004 painting by Sandow Birk entitled “On the Steps of Purgatory.”

Crossing the street in a mass of bodies, I saw the line of humanity stretching from a large doorway half a block away. Winding its way around landscaping and street vendors, the line proceeded to turn the corner and continue west to the horizon of my vision, disappearing in traffic and streetlights. I could feel the irritation welling within me, a visceral repulsion to the scene of people, the din of their voices, the seemingly endless line, and the waiting. Walking along the cheerfully buzzing throng behind bodies in no apparent hurry to claim their last position in the line as a cheerful nun encouraged over a bullhorn, I resisted the urge to turn around and leave. Fighting (mostly unsuccessfully) against the broadening grimace on my face, I forced myself to cover the nearly three city blocks to the end of the growing line. Looking at Sally, I felt the immediate sting of shame in her patient recognition of my impatience.

Later that night, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament alongside 55,000 other Catholics in a cavernous football stadium made sacred, Dante the pilgrim came to my mind. Standing on the shores of Mount Purgatory, the pilgrim sees a bright and dazzling sight coming across the water: “The heavenly pilot stood before the bow; beatitude seemed written on his face. More than a hundred souls sat toward the prow: ‘When from the land of Egypt Israel came,’ they sang together in a single voice, with all the verses written in that psalm. He blessed them with the signal of the Cross, and they cast themselves upon the beach…” (Purgatorio, Canto 2, Lines 43-50). The pilgrims around me looked heavenward toward the monstrance below, filled with desire, a hunger for the Eternal.

Modern culture has fostered a disordered relationship between our desires, the notion of satisfaction, and timing. Ours is a world in which we suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out), fueled by the urgency of knowing that YOLO (you only live once), even as we create “bucket lists” feeling that we need to “live like we are dying.” The intersection of these social forces fosters a rapacious hunger demanding to be sated, often at great cost, with the short-sightedness of beasts instinctively following their animal appetites. We are driven by these unseen needs welling within us, unaware of their source, compelled by their urgency, and dissatisfied in their fulfillment. Impatiently baying for satisfaction, we resent the delays even as we retain the hunger which cannot be gratified in the many things we chase at its prompting.

The following morning, Monsignor James Shea quoted Amos 8:11, “See, days are coming—oracle of the Lord GOD—when I will send a famine upon the land: Not a hunger for bread, or a thirst for water, but for hearing the word of the LORD.” From there, he spoke of this recurring hunger present through salvation history, as well as the impatience of God’s people. “The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died at the LORD’s hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our kettles of meat and ate our fill of bread! But you have led us into this wilderness to make this whole assembly die of famine” (Exodus 16:3)! Thousands of years later, the story has not changed. The hunger, and the impatience, remain.

In Purgatorio, Dante the pilgrim lands among souls destined for heaven but required to purge the remnants of disordered desires from their earthly existence. Finding himself on the ring of wrath, Dante gets a lesson in hunger and satisfaction from Virgil: “Because your longings focus on a point where company would lessen each man’s share, envy blows up its bellows for your sighs. But if love for the highest heavenly sphere had wrung your yearnings, turning them above, your breast wouldn’t be troubled by such fear, For there, the more who say, ‘This joy is ours,’ the more joy is possessed by every soul, the more that cloister burns in charity” (Purgatorio, Canto 15, Lines 49-57). Now even hungrier to be satisfied, Dante asks, “For how can something good, if shared by more, make each ones portion richer in its worth than if the same thing were possessed by few” (Purgatorio, Canto 15, Lines 61-63)?

Dante speaks for modern man as well, as we struggle to believe there will be enough for us while we watch others receive, making us even more impatient to be satisfied. Virgil explains the heavenly physics of abundance, “And the more souls that burn in Heaven above, as mirrors flashing light on one another, the more there is for all of them to love” (Purgatorio, Canto 15, Lines 73-75). How do we know when our impatient desire is disordered? Dante shows us that, by God’s math, well ordered desires center on things that multiply when given away.

“So what?” asked Father Mike Schmitz later that night, as he took the stage at the National Eucharistic Congress. “In their hunger, Adam and Eve broke the world,” he continued. Impatient, fearful that they might be missing out, they disobeyed to satisfy a desire for something good, that in their disobedience, became disordered. Later, Father Mike added, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. The Eucharist is a beautiful gift, but it doesn’t end as a gift of sacrifice. We must repent.” In Canto 17, Virgil offers some insights on love and the ordering of desires: “Not the Creator nor a single creature, as you know, ever existed without love, the soul’s love or the love that comes by nature. The natural love is just and cannot rove. The soul’s love strays if it desires what’s wrong or loves with too much strength, or not enough” (Purgatorio, Canto 17, Lines 91-96). That original impatient desire, a love for a good, made bad out of disobedience, broke the world.

Virgil goes on, “Now understand the other, too, the love which, though its order’s been corrupted, pursues the good. Each soul can dimly see the one good that will lay the heart at rest; this it desires, and struggles valiantly to join with it” (Canto 17, Lines 125-129). Dante understands disordered hunger, even hunger for a good. Purgatorio is the path of the repentant. “Other good things there are – not the good Being, not our blessed Joy, the root of all good things, and their fruition. The love that yields itself too much to these (lesser goods) is mourned for in three circles toward the top” (Purgatorio, Canto 17, Lines 133-137). As he moves us up the mountain of repentance and purgation, Dante shows us that, our restless, impatient, hungers, even for that which is a good, become sin when they are not ordered toward God’s ultimate goodness.

“He moved his feathers, fanning us a breeze, asserting that all they who mourn are blest, whose souls will be consoled, and dwell at ease” (Purgatorio, Canto 19, Lines 49-51). With that, another peccato (sin) was purged from Dante the pilgrim, as he climbed to the fifth cornice. Sitting in a massive hall with about 5,000 other pilgrims, I listened as Sister Josephine Garrett spoke of hunger and the wounds so often sitting behind it. As with Dante’s pilgrims, this group, aware of sin and its wounds, climbed imperfectly toward redemption. “Healing begins with repentance,” said Sister Josephine, “but we struggle to be patient as God does His work.” There it was again, patience. Why must I carry this? Where are You? Why haven’t You shown up yet? Impatience is fuel on the fire of incontinence and an anchor on the climb of redemption: in desire, rapaciously claiming its love, and in suffering, lamenting the healing thorn in our side.

Back on the mountain, Dante encounters an old friend, Forese, who gives us an insight on patience: “And all these people singing in their pain weep for immoderate service of the throat, and thirst and hunger make them pure again. The odor of the fruit and of the spray splashing its fragrant droplets in the green kindle desire in us to eat and drink. And many a time along this turning way we find the freshening of our punishment, our punishment – our solace, I should say, For that same will now lead us to the tree as once led the glad Christ to say, ‘My God,’ when by His opened veins He set us free” (Purgatorio, Canto 23, Lines 64-75). Patient suffering by the starving soul speaks to the ordering of desire and the healing nature of that process. In this way, the temporal nature of Purgatory reminds us that time is necessary for our wounds to heal, for our hungers to be sated, and for patient trust to become a pathway to joy in our journey.

In The Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton gives powerful witness to the unifying power of the desire – the thirst – that sacrificially binds us to God, as he describes the death of his brother after a plane crash in WWII: “He was very badly hurt: maybe his neck was broken. He lay in the bottom of the dinghy in delirium. He was terribly thirsty. He kept asking for water. But they didn’t have any. The water tank had broken in the crash, and the water was all gone. It did not last too long. He had three hours of it, and then he died. Something of the three hours of the thirst of Christ Who loved him, and died for him many centuries ago, and had been offered again that very day, too, on many altars” (The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton, Page 443).

Moving up into the ring of lust, Dante the pilgrim encounters more souls: “O you who are no slower in desire but walk behind to show your reverence, respond to me, who burn in thirst in fire.  I’m not alone in needing your response – everyone here is thirsting for it more than Indians or Ethiopians Thirst for cold water” (Purgatorio, Canto 26, Lines 16-22)! Such thirst, hunger, and suffering, are made redemptive in their joining to Christ’s suffering. Considering the passing of his brother, Merton closes a poem with the following stanza:

For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring:
The money of Whose tears shall fall
Into your weak and friendless hand,
And buy you back to your own land:
The silence of Whose tears shall fall
Like bells upon your alien tomb.
Hear them and come: they call you home.

Now, close to Earthly Paradise, a final shade responds to Dante: “So pleasing to me is your fine request, I neither can nor wish to hide my face. I am Arnaut, who walk and sing in tears. I see too well the folly of my days, and see, with joy and hope, the joy ahead. And so I beg of you, by that same power that leads you to the summit of the stairs, at the just time recall my sufferings. At that he hid in the refining fire” (Purgatorio, Canto 26, Lines 140-148). In the end, we can find joy in the thirst and patient suffering, but only if we can unite it to a higher purpose, just like those souls in Dante’s Purgatorio, waiting for their liberation into Paradise.

Confessing my own impatience late the night of the closing of the National Eucharistic Congress, I too found myself liberated. Thousands of pilgrims descended upon Indianapolis, each climbing his or her own cornice of Mount Purgatory, each possessing the many hungers that grip us in our earthly lives, and each feeling the sorrow of those which have become disordered. For each of us, Dante’s Purgatorio offers an eternal message of hope amid the failings that mark our days. We are designed to hunger for Him who made us, and though we will continue to pursue our loves imperfectly and often impatiently, His sacrifice for us has made redemption possible for all those who can see their own need to repent.

For this, Dante offers his closing words: “But because now the pages set upon this second canticle’s loom are all complete, the rein of art prevents my writing on. From its most holy waters I returned as remade as a new young plant appears renewed in every newly springing frond, Pure, and in trim for mounting to the stars” (Purgatorio, Canto 33, Lines 139-145).