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Books to Save Your Soul

From Dante’s Divine Comedy to two new memoirs of faith
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A couple of years ago, I published an essay on Time’s website explaining why despite anticipation that Francis, the new pope, would bring disaffected and former Catholics back to the Roman church, I would not be among the reverts.

I left Catholicism in 2006 in anger over the sex abuse scandal, and when the new pope spoke of wanting a less judgmental church, I had no idea what he meant. In my American experience, the church seemed unwilling to pass judgment at all.

I had learned to be suspicious of priests talking about God’s love, hearing it as cheap grace and therapeutic treacle. The Ash Wednesday homily in which the pastor in my wealthy parish told the congregation that Lent was a time for us to learn to “love ourselves more” was the last straw.

By then, clerical jabber about compassion sounded to my ears like rhetorical sleight of hand meant to distract the laity from passing judgment on bishops and priests guilty of terrible sins.

In response to my Francis essay, a reader of my American Conservative blog, a Lutheran seminarian named Charles Featherstone, pushed back. “It is no small thing to say, ‘God is love,’ or ‘God loves you,’” he wrote in the comments section. Then Charles told his own story.

He grew up in an abusive home. His father, a dour military man, beat him. School was no better. Students tormented him, even teachers found ways to humiliate the boy. He peed his pants out of anxiety, which brought more scorn from his father and school bullies. No adult would help.

Charles became alienated and angry—deeply, passionately, volcanically angry at the cruelty and injustice of the world. In the late 1980s, he started attending a university in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“I met some Muslims, Palestinians and African Americans, and was impressed,” he wrote. “Here are people who live on the bottom, unloved, unwanted, in the shadow of constant violence that calls itself righteous.”

They accepted him into their fellowship and taught him their faith. In Islam, Charles found an outlet for his rage. He wanted to join the jihad in Bosnia in the 1990s, but his non-Muslim wife would not let him. Later, after earning a college degree, Charles took a job as a financial reporter based in lower Manhattan. That’s where he was on September 11, 2001. Charles wrote in that stunning online comment:

It was in the midst of that crowd, in the midst of the terror, the death, the destruction, that I heard, not in the way you would hear a voice, but inside my head, ‘My love is all that matters. And this is who I am.’

I’ve had God in my head before, twice during times of solitary prayer in masjids, and it is terrifying, overwhelming, engulfing.

I almost never say this publicly, because there are so few people I share this story with. I feel grateful that I was there, at the WTC on that day. I lived in a world where I could have flown an airplane into a tall building and called it righteousness. I was that angry. And there I was, in the midst of someone else’s violent vengeance fantasy, being forced to look hard into the very face of the kinds of things I used to believe. I don’t mean Islam here. I mean vengeance. Revolutionary violence as a cover for simply wanting to inflict upon the world the kind of pain you’ve suffered.

Staggered by this experience, Charles re-evaluated his life. Eventually he became a Christian, but as he later said, he does not equate Islam with violence; Charles retains respect, gratitude, and affection for his Muslim friends. He ended his remarks by saying he no longer lives in a world where flying an airplane into a building makes sense, but he knows that many still do.

“There are people, really, who have felt the judgment of the world fall on them so hard they feel squished flat,” he concluded. “A word of love means everything. Changes everything. Because it is no small thing.”

It was a stunning testimony, and it led to a book deal. Charles Featherstone’s recently published memoir, The Love That Matters: Meeting Jesus in the Midst of Terror and Death tells the whole story of his journey. It is one of the most gripping spiritual autobiographies I have ever read.

I had the galleys of Charles’s book in hand as I was writing my own memoir, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem. Charles and I are both middle-aged and have struggled along very different paths. Today, I’m an established journalist with a stable middle-class life. Charles and his wife live hard on the economic margins of life in Chicago. I’m a theological and political conservative, while Charles, though not exactly a church liberal—he believes, for example, that progressive churches wrongly downplay the reality of sin—is radically committed to serving the poor and the outcast.

Aside from our shared Christian faith, we share a history of grappling for almost all our lives with injustice and a sense of exile and having found, in our distinct ways, how to put aside our anger and open ourselves to the healing love of God.

The healing love of God. The phrase makes me cringe because the feel-good preachers of our time have voided the words of meaning. Yet, God’s love is a real thing, a force more radical than I had ever imagined. Charles Featherstone’s hard experience in life revealed this to him. My self-protective irony and easier life relative to Charles’s made me a harder nut to crack. As I first wrote in The American Conservative a year ago, it took a chance encounter with the Divine Comedy amid a great personal crisis to break down defenses keeping God’s love at a distance.

Dante’s journey from wealthy insider to impoverished outcast was abrupt, and the imaginative journey he subsequently took in the Divine Comedy is his attempt to understand the injustice that had befallen him, and to reconcile it with his faith. The parallels between Dante’s struggles, Featherstone’s, and my own were striking. In the end, we all arrived at the same destination: a conclusion that God loves us and in that truth is our rescue.

That concept does not sound at all trite when you consider the inferno of self-loathing, rejection, and wrath through which Charles Featherstone trod for most of his life. Nor is it trite in the mouth of Dante, who explores divine love as the only credible answer to the brokenness and injustice of the world. And as Dante helped me see, it was not trite to me.

Dante showed that I despaired of God’s love because I had confused it with the love of my father, whose standards I could never attain. In the wake of my sister’s death in 2011, I gave my dad the gift he most desired: moving my family back to our rural Louisiana hometown. And it had still not been enough to win his approval. The rejection from him and from my sister’s family shattered me, with dramatic physical and psychological results. I fell into a depression and was eventually diagnosed with chronic mononucleosis that a rheumatologist said was brought on by relentless anxiety.

I was overcome by rage. I was raised in a family where love was openly shared and spoken of often. But now I wondered what the word meant in our clan. I would not turn my anxious wrath on them. So my body turned it on itself.

On my Dante journey, a key turning point came in Purgatorio, halfway up the seven-story mountain, when the pilgrim meets Marco the Lombard. Like other penitents on that terrace, Marco is being purged of his tendency toward anger, which envelops him as burning, blinding smoke. The pilgrim asks Marco why the world is so filled with violence, chaos, and injustice.

“Brother,” says Marco, “the world is blind and indeed you come from it.”

The problem, Marco continues, is passion, especially the passion of anger. You cannot control the world, he counsels, but you can control your own heart and mind. Dante had to hit bottom to see where his passions, especially his impotent wrath, had led him. My epiphany came with the pilgrim Dante’s, in the pages of a book. Charles Featherstone’s came on a true dies irae, beneath the burning towers.

Later the pilgrim Dante learns that God’s love does not always correct injustice in the mortal life but welcoming it into your heart gives you the strength to bear pain and injustice—and even to turn anger, itself a form of disordered love, into a source of new life.

These lessons did not come easily. Once, during my walk with Dante, my confessor, exasperated by my customary complaints about my family’s unfairness, said to me, “What do you want?”

“I want justice!” I said.

The priest smiled. “What does love have to do with justice?”

In that moment, I knew that God’s love was something far more powerful than the powder-puff sentimentality. Warning against confusing love with soft emotion, Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Charity is hard and endures.” thisissueappears

I learned the meaning of that phrase by following the pilgrim Dante to the heights of heaven and back to his life of permanent exile. I’m learning it from the continuing saga of Charles Featherstone. Though his seminary faculty recommended him for ordination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America candidacy committee rejected him. A church insider privy to the process told him that his past was too messy. He had two brief love affairs as a young man, one of which was with a married woman when Charles was 19. A hapless soldier who could not get the hang of military life, Charles received a psychological discharge from the Army.

All of this happened nearly 30 years ago, long before his Christian conversion. But it was enough to justify his rejection, Charles heard. After six years of seminary, Charles Featherstone has nothing: no job and less than $100 to his name. But he has a story—he is a story.

When I corresponded with Charles by email this spring, he told me that the hardest thing he faces is knowing that he may never find his way to what he wants more than anything: a place where he belongs and is accepted. But he has everything he needs, and that is enough.

In the Bible, the people God has chosen for His purposes, Charles says, are usually misfits and exiles, “people called to leave, to wander, to never find rest except as guests in homes that are not theirs. God uses people like me—perhaps even needs people like me—to speak the words that must be spoken. I don’t understand it, and I truly wish it were not like this. My home is with Christ, and that will have to suffice in this world.”

These words could have been spoken by Dante, who died in exile in Ravenna in 1321. In Paradiso XVII, Dante’s sainted ancestor Cacciaguida tells his wandering descendant that exile is to be his fate, and then charges him to spend the rest of his life bearing witness:

Nonetheless, forswear all falsehood,

revealing all that you have seen,

and then let him who itches scratch.


For, if your voice is bitter at first taste,

it will later furnish vital nourishment

once it has been swallowed and digested.

This was what Dante was to do with his experience: write about it, tell the truth about what happened so that others may learn from his journey. The love of God working within the exiled poet turned his wrath over injustice and rejection into a work of art that is both a pinnacle of civilization and, as Dante intended, a sure guide to leading those in misery to a state of joy.

The poet who led me through the Inferno, up the mountain of Purgatorio, and through the heights of Paradiso also inspired me to return and tell others what I saw there. Putting it all into words revealed even more anger within me that, with the help of my confessor, I had to purge. Writing the pilgrimage story was part of my deliverance from debilitating wrath.

Something similar happened to Charles. The act of retracing his steps as a memoirist was therapeutic, even akin to an exorcism.

“It was like suddenly I was free,” he told me. “I was no longer haunted. Everything had been resolved. Even high school made sense, and I was able to come to terms with that experience.”

If Charles and I have done our jobs well, our books may have more impact on readers than most sermons or apologetics, simply because they are stories. The commonplace Christian truths Dante embodies in his Commedia are not novel, but they struck me with the profundity of a thunderbolt. Researching my Dante book, I discovered that neuroscientists have demonstrated that people absorb information more completely if it’s presented to them in the form of a beautifully written story rather than as propositions and arguments. Years of mewling sermons about the love of God did nothing for me. But Dante Alighieri’s 14,000-line cathedral in verse telling of God’s transformative love saved my life.

Two writers, two pilgrimages, two books about the journey, both arriving at the same destination: life in communion with divine love. Charles and I agreed that we hope readers struggling with their own inability to love, or be loved, will find insight in our own accounts. Neither one of us is a theologian. But we are both storytellers with our own roles to play in the divine drama.

“There are lots of people who suffer silently, who bear great burdens, who’ve been told again and again that they are problems and are not worthy of breathing and sharing space, they have nothing to offer anyone. They are the people I’ve written the book for,” he said. “God has shown me that the story doesn’t end the way I thought it would, or hoped it would. But people see, and are living out their faith in love because I am in their lives or have touched them. And this, I can take joy in.”

God’s love makes the tragedy of Charles’s vagabond life into a comedy—that is, a story with a happy ending, no matter what happens next. It is not a small thing to say, “God is love” or “God loves you.” I know that now, thanks to a Tuscan Catholic poet and a Chicago Protestant memoirist, both of whom were poor, but both of whom are rich in divine charity—a charity that is hard, that endures, and that in the end is the only thing that matters.

Rod Dreher’s new memoir How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem is in bookstores now.

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