By Joseph R. Wood.

As I convert, I've heard some wonderful stories of other people's conversions. Many warrant publication because of the unexpected ways that God's grace often reaches us. And interest in conversion, at least among Christians, is widespread, real, and often touching.

My own story is mundane, a version of Walker Percy's explanation of why he chose Catholicism: What else is there? But some conversion journeys are much more riveting. What is conversion, and what does it demand?

In the second part of the Divine Comedy – Purgatorio – Dante and his guide Virgil have emerged from Hell, which presented trials for them and eternal tribulations for those who will never emerge. It was a rough journey through Inferno: hostile demons, treacherous terrain, and worst of all, the horrors Dante sees the damned undergo with no hope of salvation.

Only Dante's poetic genius, aided by the virtuous direction of his fellow poet and mentor Virgil, allows him to convey something of the wretchedness he has observed. Now he looks forward to an easier progress through Purgatory, which will bring its own challenges, including a challenge to Dante to deliver even better poetry than he had in Inferno. Only a better poetic product suits the better place.

Now, the prospect of eternal salvation, however distant but ultimately assured, replaces the despair of eternal damnation.

To run its course through smoother water

the small bark of my wit now hoists its sail,

leaving that cruel sea behind.

Now I shall sing the second kingdom,

there where the soul of man is cleansed,

made worthy to ascend to Heaven.

Here from the dead let poetry rise up,

O sacred Muses.

(Purgatorio Canto 1 1 through 8, Hollander trans.)

Dante opens this second cantica with a comparison of his work to a second, smoother voyage. He trips quickly along to another metaphor, his poetic work as singing, bringing forth a song that will carry the reality of this kingdom of the saved to his reader-listener.

This new song of voyage actually seems to begin at the end of Inferno, with a change in Dante himself. In the final canto of that volume, Virgil has escorted Dante to Dis, the frozen floor of Hell, where Satan, "the creature who was once so fair of face," rests unrestfully after his fall from Heaven:

Then how faint and frozen I became,

reader, do not ask, for I do not write it,

since any words would fail to be enough.

I did not die, nor did I stay alive.

Imagine, if you have the wit,

what I became, deprived of both.

(Inferno 34 22 through 27)

At this moment, Dante is not "dead or alive," as the saying goes, but neither. He is suspended between the only two states of being that we attribute to men.

As Robert Hollander explains in his notes, many commentators see this as a moment of conversion for Dante, when his "fear of Hell becomes the fear of God." Dante passes "from the state of death to the state of living in God's forgiveness." Other commentators describe this moment as "the culmination of the penitential imitation of Christ in the descent into Hell, symbolically the pilgrim's death to sin, that is, the death of the 'old man.'"

Dante's descent to Dis now becomes an ascent, first to Purgatory, then on to Paradise.

Only that conversion readies Dante for his second voyage through the cleansing of Purgatory to the happiness of Heaven, and prepares him to report that second journey poetically and musically. Dante went through Hell to turn to God and be given the poetic gifts to complete the Comedy.

In his book, Into Your Hands, Father: Abandoning Ourselves to the God Who Loves Us, Fr. Wilfrid Stinissen begins with St. Augustine and moves through St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross (and a few other residents of Paradise) to offer a beautiful account of conversion as abandonment to divine will. In his conclusion, he turns his account over to a Flemish priest who describes a radical turning to God:

For years. . .I had a dream. I sat completely alone on the earth. Compl...