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I had begun reading The Divine Comedy around the time I started therapy, which was around the time I began observing the daily prayer rule. Going on the imaginative journey out of the dark wood with Dante, a spiritual and psychological pilgrimage through self-analysis and ascetic discipline, and towards learning how to re-order my understanding, brought the work my priest and my therapist were trying to do within me to astonishing fruition. I have been so ecstatic about Dante in this space recently because the power of art, working in conjunction with the power of prayer and the sacraments, and with the advice of a wise counselor, really did heal me. For example, when the pilgrim asks Marco the Lombard, in Purgatory, to tell him why the world is in such a bad state, Marco reminds him that blindness is in our nature, but that God gave us free will, and therefore power to change our fates, or at least control our reactions to events. This is nothing that my priest and my therapist hadn’t been telling me for some time … but there was something about hearing a penitent tell me these words along the pilgrim’s route with Dante and Virgil that made it catch fire inside my moral imagination.

This happened a lot. And without me quite realizing what was going on, God re-ordered my heart. It was confession, it was prayer, it was the liturgy, it was vespers, it was talking with my therapist, and it was, of course, reading Dante. One day I’ll write more about exactly how this came about; it’s why I am so on fire to talk to you readers about how Dante can save your life. Anyway, the point is, one day I woke up and knew that God the Father loved me. After that, everything fell into place. I could see clearly. The fear, the anxiety, the despair — all gone. And so was the chronic fatigue.