“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Dante’s The Divine Comedy is my challenge read this year. It’s been incredibly tough and not just a little humbling. I chose to begin journeying through the poem during Lent without any sort of specific plan to finish the first cantica, Inferno, near unto Holy Week. In God’s good providence, it happened anyways. After spending Holy Saturday evening with the girls in our Tenebrae service, we kept the candles going and let the girls stay up late reading with us by candlelight and flashlight. It was dark, it was quiet, it was haunting, and I was reading about the ninth ring of hell and Dante’s long-anticipated encounter with Satan. As Virgil and Dante make a bizarre crawl down Satan’s back and through the centre of earth, shifting from the northern to the southern hemisphere, and then up, up, up to sea, land, and sky on the mountain island of Purgatorio, I simultaneously contemplated the disciples despair at the last and seemingly final breath of Jesus. Their world crashed around them. All they believed to be true fractured and they lost hope. In fear and darkness they sat, waiting. Unlike Dante and his guide coming out of hell and into purgatory, when the disciples clamoured out of their hopelessness and into the light of the resurrection, it was to an everlasting light and invitation into glory.

Occasionally I glanced up from my own thoughts to see the flickering flames reflected on my children’s faces. They weren’t slogging through hell and into purgatory, but they were absorbed in their own worlds. A tale of the Spanish civil war had Ray’s full attention, Gemma coloured away while listening to Anne (with an E) get herself and her imagination into any number of scrapes, and Willa travelled with Christian on the road to the Celestial City. I wanted to capture that evening in a bottle and hold onto it. But, alas, time moves relentlessly forward.

Easter Sunday was a bit of a crash for us with a number of things going wrong at the same time. After spending the previous evening in such contemplative quiet, Brian and I were able to face the unexpectedness of Sunday with relative calm. Reflecting back over Lent and Easter, our experience was heavy with missed expectations, interruptions, and inconveniences. The Lord was waiting for us in each of those moments, as he was watching over the disciples in their moment of grief. He is faithful.