This blog will describe a spiritual exercise for Lent 2009, which is a slow, meditative reading of Dante's Purgatorio, the second book of his Divine Comedy. I have practiced this most Lents over the last ten years. My reason for blogging it this year is simply to add a discipline, trying to summarize some thought or insight about the day's Canto, each day of the exercise. If no one reads it, no matter. If someone does, and we can share insights, then all to the good.

Let me say straight up that I am no professional Dantist. I lack the most fundamental tool to be one: an ability to read Italian. I am simply a Catholic christian, a scientist by training, for whom Dante's Comedy has been a key point of reference over the last quarter of a century. I rely on Dorothy Sayers's translation (completed by Barbara Reynolds) which Penguin Classics publish. I have no authorityto recommend it, but its notes and commentary have always been helpful. So, a health warning. If you stumble on this while preparing an essay on Dante, better look somewhere else. However, I should say that I have found some resources helpful, notably Freccero's collection of essays "Dante and the Poetics of Conversion", "The Cambridge Companion to Dante" edited by Rachel Jacoff, Holmes's "Dante" in the OUP "Past Masters" series, and the poetry of Charles Williams with its commentary by CS Lewis.I still have to read Williams's "The Figure of Beatrice".

If you don't know the Purgatorio, then this exercise is not for you. I do not think any one could make sense of the poem reading it for the first time at a rate of one Canto per day, and without having read Inferno which precedes it. So if this intrigues you, but Dante is new to you, then find something else to do in Lent 2009, and read through the whole Comedy in time for Lent 2010.
The Purgatorio consists of 33 Cantos or verses. I read one per day during the working days (Monday to Friday) of Lent, starting on the First Monday of Lent. This way I reach Canto 26 on the Monday ofHoly Week. I read two cantos (29 and 30) on Holy Thursday and two on Good Friday (31 and 32). These latter two include Dante's vision of the Tree of Life blossoming, an apt image for the most solemn moments of Lent. The final canto can be read on Holy Saturday, perhaps in preparation for the Easter Vigil.

I shall do my best to keep up this blog. It starts in earnest next Monday. I may fill in some thoughts on background before then. If you see nothing further it is probably because of my lack of electronic expertise.While programming computers has taken up much of my time over the last 20 years, I have never tried to make them blog before.