Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. This is Matt Petrucic Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute.

This week we are bringing you the next lecture from Bishop Barron's popular course, Dante's Catholic

Imagination, which is available in its entirety inside the Word on Fire Institute.

We hope you enjoy this deep dive into Dante's Evergreen, always relevant, poetic, moral, and

theological genius.

So with that introduction of mind, let's turn to the marvelous text itself.

Let me just read to you a couple of the opening lines here.

So Kanto 1 of the Inferno. Midway along the journey of our life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood for I'd wandered off from the

straight path. First of all midway I told you he was born in 1265. The poem is set in the year 1300. So Dante is 35.

Now, for biblically formed people, go back to the song.

How long is the lifespan?

70 years or 80 for those who are strong. And so for the

medieval's especially 35 was midlife. But notice how Dante says midway along the

journey of our life. So right away he's drawing everybody

into this story. It's about him and his kind of midlife crisis, but it's also

about all of us. There is something about midlife when the things

that used to satisfy us, the paths that used to bring us where we want to go, the

strategies that used to work suddenly don't work. They don't

bring us where we want to go. We find ourselves lost. Again, for many years of doing

spiritual direction and counseling, hearing confessions,

I know a lot of people somewhere around midlife who feel exactly this way,

alone and lost in a dark wood, having wandered from the straight path.

...