Hip-Deep: Thoughts On An Inspirational Poem

In Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri opened his poem about his journey with these words:

In the middle of our life journey
I found myself in a dark wood.
I had wandered from the straight path.
It isn’t easy to talk about it:
It was such a thick, wild and rough forest,
That when I think of it my fear returns…
I can offer no good explanation for how I entered it.
I was so sleepy at that point,
That I strayed from the right path.

Before long Dante’s journey took him to the mouth of a cave, the entrance to Hell; chiseled in rock above the mouth of Hell were the words — Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.

Dante’s poem resonates with me recently.

“I had wandered from the straight path. It isn’t easy to talk about it… I can’t offer any good explanation of how I entered. I was so sleepy… I strayed from the right path”.

Sounds pretty bleak.

A footpath into Hell.

While Dante’s decent into the Inferno led him to classic poetry of high drama with vivid scenes of wild landscapes, of demons and of the damned in torment, my own decent into the dark night of the soul leads into the bland.

The way I’m feeling, were I to write a poem at the moment, it would not be chicken soup but tofu for the soul.

I live in a hell made of oatmeal.

No milk.

No sugar.

No butter.

Just oatmeal.

Cold.

Gustave Dore’s engraving of Dante talking with a guy stuck in Hell’s muck.

My recent state manifests itself in a lack of interest in anything.

I can’t get excited about reading or writing, prayer or pornography, Bible or blogging.

There’s just nothing inside me at the moment.

That’s the key — at the moment.

I’ve been down this path before. I’ve wallowed in this slough time and again periodically. It is a downer, but it’s not permanent.

Every swamp drains. Every bed of quicksand eventually dries.

Once out fishing I sank hip-deep in mud.

When you’re stuck in deep muck, every movement of your legs creates a stronger vacuum to hold your feet fast in the mire. Every struggle locks you in tighter.

You have to lay flat on the surface of the mud to distribute your weight and gently swim your way out.

You get filthy, but you get out.

Your shoes may well be sucked right off your feet, but you can escape alive.

Yes, Dante’s journey started off with him lost in a wood at the mouth of Hell and he went downhill from there; but eventually, his journey took him into celestial realms, to Heaven, to a vision of God.

Abandon Hope.

Hell no!

Where I am now is but a way station on the journey.

Home lies ahead.

Jesus is Lord even here in the piney woods at the mouth of Hell.

He’s been here before.

Resurrection from the dead — remember?

Oddly enough, while I’m in this dark night of my own soul, some other people seem to find me helpful. The other day my friend Wes said that a visit with me was the high point of his week! And the other night I emceed a civic meeting to which people responded with enthusiasm.

Isn’t that odd?

Here I’m stuck up to my ass in oatmeal, yet other people seem to get something out of my company.

Strange, that.

I know what it is.

People just love my jokes.

For instance, to close that meeting the other night, I told this one:

For Christmas the seven dwarfs pooled their money and bought Snow White a digital camera. But, even with pooling their money the dwarfs did not have enough to buy her a loading dock to make prints of her photos.

Nevertheless, Snow White was happy and went through the forest taking snapshots of each of the dear little dwarfs and of the dear dear little animals. Chipmunks, and squirrels and bunnies and deer.

She wanted to give copies of their photos to everyone at the forest’s New Year’s Eve party, so she took her new digital camera to a Wal-Mart Photo Center to be developed.

The clerk explained that she’d have to leave the camera because the rush of folks wanting their Christmas photos overwhelmed the facility.

A few days later Snow White returned to the store to get her pictures.

The clerk apologized saying that he had so many customers that he’d had to outsource work and Snow White’s camera had been misplaced.

Snow White began to weep. “I did so want to give all the dear dear dwarfs and the dear little creatures of the forest copies of their own photos,” she said.

The clerk patted her on the shoulder saying that he would place a trace on her order to locate her camera.

“But I wanted to give them their photos at the New Year’s Eve party,” Snow White said. “They’ll all be so excited to see their own photos”.

“Don’t worry, Snow White,” the clerk said, “Someday your prints will come”.