Going to hell to find God
“The infernal hurricane that never rests / Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine”
~ Dante, Inferno V, lines 31-32
Prologue {Lillibridge Elementary, c. 1971}
I can clearly remember that fateful day filled with lachrymose as if it were yesterday: a transcendent day inside the reading room of Ms. Mirandi’s fifth-grade at Lillibridge Elementary, Detroit, Mich. I was 10 years old. By “reading room” I mean a corner of the classroom decorated like a library. There were three or four nice decorative chairs, a small sofa, a Persian rug, a coffee table, a lamp and, of course, the epitome of that wonderful space … a bookshelf filled with classical books.
Dante’s ‘Inferno’
Two books I remember with an inexplicable clarity are John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and “Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy – Hell, Purgatory, Paradise,” translated by Henry W. Longfellow, Illustrated by Gustave Doré.
This book became my obsession. While I didn’t know it then, this classic opus would also become my destiny.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I will focus on Doré’s pictures, for it was these exquisite etchings that pricked my soul, that convicted me that I, even as a little boy, was a sinner in danger of eternal hell like those tragic figures Doré illustrated in Dante’s “Inferno,” and therefore I needed to make a sober, rational decision based on both deductive reasoning and faith – to give my heart, my life, my soul to God.
God created my body, soul and spirit, and my spirit would never have rest in this life until I gave my soul back to its Creator who first gave it to me. Since my father abandoned me as a little baby I had issues of low self-esteem, loneliness and fear, which led me to foolish decision making, most prominently anger.
Dante wrote in Inferno VII, lines 115-116: “Son, thou now beholdest / The souls of those whom anger overcame …”
Page after page after page I read. Canto after canto after canto, like Dante’s guide, Virgil, I eagerly followed where his words took me. I bore witness to the unspeakable horrors of hell with a mixture of childlike wonder, fear and utter revulsion, yet I couldn’t stop reading that book every day … every way. I was obsessed with Dante, but more with the illustrations by Doré. It was like within those grotesque illustrations of horror and damnation I saw my very soul reflected back to me: THERE, lost with the millions of others who had died without God down through the ages captured by the genius of Doré as no artist ever could in the above-titled panel, “The infernal hurricane.”
Would this be my fate? Would I remain eternally lost inside this ghetto hell? Dante wrote in Inferno III, line 9: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Was my destiny already decided? If so, then should I follow the Siren song of the Greek Epicureans whose philosophy was: “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die”?
No, No, No! I rejected the zeitgeist of hedonism, for I saw its pernicious and life-destructive effects on the lives of the people I lived with in my neighborhood; inside the hopeless, racially segregated ghettos of Detroit after the 1967 riot – the pimps, the prostitutes, the pushers, the drug addicts, drunks, hustlers, and gangbangers … the idle, the lazy, the lost. This was my hell as I, like Dante and Virgil, passed by them daily as a little ghetto boy going to school. Therefore, I knew if I did what those people did I would end up in Dante’s Inferno, and I earnestly didn’t want to remain inside that abode of the damned. Yet, I also remembered a sermon of a preacher whose text was 2 Peter 3:9: The Lord is not … willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/going-to-hell-to-find-god/#7aMsBWRyFyQc21Bk.99
Category: Commentary
