Dante's Easter Journey

Part 3: Holy Saturday. The withered wood and the wisdom we carry.

Inferno, Canto 13 : The suicides in the forest, illustration from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, 1885

Part 3: Holy Saturday

The Withered Wood and the Wisdom We Carry

Every year, Holy Saturday feels like a day of silence to me. We wait. Christ lies in the tomb as the disciples scatter. In the moment, it must have felt like God was completely absent. But beneath the silence, something is happening.

In canto 13 of Inferno, Dante guides us through a forest unlike any other: the Wood of souls who harmed themselves, some by taking their own lives out of despair. The trees only speak when their branches are plucked. It’s a disturbing image, and one that haunts me every time I think about it.

Dante doesn’t mock these souls: he listens to them. I imagine he realizes that they’re trapped for eternity in the same kind of dark wood that Virgil came to save him from, not so long ago. And that, too, is part of redemption: there are people in our lives—maybe some of us reading these thoughts, right now—who know what it feels like to be silenced by grief and shame, who wait in silence, wondering if the light will return. I want to underscore the promise of redemption with a resounding yes: it will. And it will dispel the darkness. Even if that seems impossible to imagine right now.

Dante knows that even in our most broken places, wisdom is waiting for us. And more often than not, it’s through community—through the presence of another, even when they speak through a book rather than an in-the-flesh encounter—that healing begins.

Christ descended to the dead to lift us up, to call all of us forth, and to make the dry bones live. We’re destined to rise. Even when it seems like Hell itself wants to swallow us whole, we carry the Light within us.

“We once were men, and now are changed to trees.”

🎥 Video: Dante Minutes — Can Our Hardest Trials Lead to Wisdom? Dante Inferno 13 (part 1): https://youtube.com/shorts/DJXb8OIXBas

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The Greats Story Lab was founded by SJ Murray, Ph.D. (Princeton), a Professor at Baylor University and EMMY®-nominated filmmaker, and Imagineer Courtney Becker. The Greats is about bringing the great literary works to the people once again, using film and other creative media. Not only have they worked on Dante but also on Boethius as well as shorter projects on Plato, Shakespeare and more. To a lot of people, reading the classics is a daunting thought, but in not engaging we miss out on contemplating the big questions of life that drove these writers, and form a back-drop to our daily lives. Additionally, we miss out on what has gone into the foundations and building of what one might call Western civilisation. Please go to their website here, or their youtube page here to learn more.