Wake Up Call

"Dante shows us that you can just as easily go to Hell by loving good things in the wrong way as you can by loving the wrong things. It's a subtle lesson, and a difficult lesson, and a lesson that is no less difficult to learn in the twenty-first century than it was in the fourteenth. But it's still necessary to learn. Happy is the man who embraces this wisdom at any point in his life, but happier is the man who does so in his youth."

Wow. Rod Dreher in a few sentences just summarized my entire high school experience. I spent a lot of time in high school developing a mind set like this, just was never able to really articulate what I was thinking. Dreher's article thoroughly relates Dante's Inferno to today's reader and is a good wake up call. However, the work itself is an extreme wake up call.

Dante's work so sharply awakens the reader with his tales of the damned. For me the Inferno was brilliant, yet agonizing. Every tale caused me grief in some way, as was Dante's purpose in writing. I found in particularly interesting that the hero's of the world were in hell. So glorified by humans, these "great" legends are in eternal misery.

As a whole, this work made me long for heaven that much more. I found myself thanking Jesus for His grace through every agonizing level of hell.

P.S. I commented on Matt's post.