In Via
The Pilgrimage of Dante and the Mysteries of Mercy, Suffering, & Sin
This week, we're sitting down with Father Chase C.S.C., a Holy Cross priest and Dante scholar. In addition to hearing about Father Chase's experience on the Camino de Santiago, we'll delve into Dante's Divine Comedy. Can we say the Divine Comedy itself is a type of pilgrimage?
Together, we'll traverse through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, understanding how life can derail, how we can reclaim our goodness, and ultimately, how to see God face to face. Join us for a thought-provoking conversation as we contemplate the mystery of life's journey, God's mercy, suffering, and the ultimate objective of becoming a homo comprehensor - seeing God face to face.
This week, we're sitting down with Father Chase C.S.C., a Holy Cross priest and Dante scholar. In addition to hearing about Father Chase's experience on the Camino de Santiago, we'll delve into Dante's Divine Comedy. Can we say the Divine Comedy itself is a type of pilgrimage?
Together, we'll traverse through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, understanding how life can derail, how we can reclaim our goodness, and ultimately, how to see God face to face. Join us for a thought-provoking conversation as we contemplate the mystery of life's journey, God's mercy, suffering, and the ultimate objective of becoming a homo comprehensor - seeing God face to face.
Welcome to In Via, the podcast where we're navigating the pilgrimage of life. We are all in via on the way and we are learning a lot as we go. I'm your host, Joan Watson. Join me as we listen to stories, discover travel tips and learn more about our Catholic faith. Along the way, we'll see that if God seeks to meet us in Jerusalem, Rome or Santiago, he also wants to encounter you right there in your car, on your run or in the middle of your workday. Hi and welcome back to In Via, the podcast, where we look at the pilgrimage of daily life, and I am excited today to be with Father Chase CSC, who is going to talk to us a little bit about his pilgrimage, but then also, hopefully, his dissertation. Yes, please. Everyone loves to be asked about how their dissertation is, in some seasons of life, sure.
Joannie:This is a good season of life.
Fr. Chase:It is a good season of life. I'm happy to talk.
Joannie:But we are here at Moreau Seminary and right before Father leaves us to go to merry old England. So, Father, why don't we start by just talking about who you are? So our listeners are introduced to you, and I'm going to start with. If you could tell people three sentences about yourself, what would those three sentences be?
Fr. Chase:I loved that question because it's such a I had to think about it, though you know what are my three sentences? So I'm a Holy Cross priest and Dante scholar now by training, just getting this PhD in the bag a couple of months ago. So that's what I work on and that's what I write on. I count that as one sentence. Second sentence I have a hard time answering the question where are you from? Because I feel like my roots are just all over the place. And then the third sentence is that my great dream in life which I don't think that I will accomplish is I want to be the first priest to say Mass in space. But I think that's going to go to some Air Force chaplain or some like fancy priests with connections to private billionaire space travel. I don't think it's going to happen, but I would love. I would love that.
Joannie:You need to like be a chaplain for Space Force. Yes, I do. I need to find a way to make it work. That's incredible. That is a really fantastic dream. Do you think it will be on the International Space Station or do you think it would be when we colonize the moon?
Fr. Chase:It's probably going to be on the moon, but so even if I wasn't the first, I think in our lifetime will probably have some sort of space travel or space tourism, and I think once that becomes a reality. It would just be nice to do that at some point, I think.
Joannie:Maybe you can be the first chaplain for Verso's pilgrimage to the moon, if you guys do that.
Fr. Chase:Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. If you guys do that, I'm signing up now. Signing up now.
Joannie:We'll have to find a reason to pilgrimage to the moon. Oh, there's lots of reasons because, as we talk about on this podcast, like pilgrimage is a big term, it doesn't just mean going to the Holy Land, it doesn't just mean going, but every place could be sacred right. Because God's created it and made it good. And so we can find definite reasons to take a pilgrimage to the moon.
Joannie:So awesome. Okay, well, before we get too off track about the moon, I thought your second sentence was really interesting. You don't want to talk about where you, or you can't answer where you've been from because it's so varied, and even that is interesting. When we think of pilgrimage, we have to know where we're going. We don't necessarily need to know where we've come from, because it's in the past, although it plays into our who we are, because a pilgrim is basically something of a wanderer right.
Fr. Chase:Not to jump right into the Dante stuff, but you know, he like he defined what it meant to be a pilgrim as somebody who is away from or outside of their homeland, their home country. And for him, what is our home country? It's heaven. But even, yeah, feeling sometimes displaced in terms of what state am I from, what city do I identify with? Where would I say I'm from? It kind of helps internalize that sense that, yeah, like I'm on my way somewhere. I'm not grounded in any one place, I'm in between, and that in-betweenness is going somewhere.
Joannie:Hopefully. Yeah, we were not made for this. We always look forward and yeah, that's really, it's really fascinating. So when we, when we talk about pilgrimage, before we talk about Dante, have you ever been on pilgrimage?
Fr. Chase:So the big, the big one that I remember is the Camino de Santiago back in 2008, when I was a FOCUS missionary and helping to lead a group of students on that Pilgrimage Walk to the tomb of Saint James. But I've also, yeah, on various student trips that were run out of my alma mater, Seton Hall University. There were pilgrimage trips on through campus ministry to Spain and Lourdes, and I studied abroad in Rome for a semester, which was a awesome opportunity and, even though you know that was living in the city, nevertheless every day becomes a trip to a new church, a new saint, a new relic and, yeah, so I'd say quite a few, quite a few people, just not all in Europe, I guess, you know, also in the States, you know, just, I went to Seton Hall University, so one of my patron saints is Seton, Elizabeth Ann Seton, that's who it's named after the school, and so you know those sorts of day trips that you can make to the shrines of our own saints.
Joannie:Katharine Drexel in Philadelphia.
Fr. Chase:Elizabeth Ann Seton in Emmitsburg, John Neumann in Philadelphia.
Joannie:I think that's really important for us to remember that we think of pilgrimage as being these big trips that are expensive and far away, and they can often be in our backyard.
Fr. Chase:Right.
Joannie:I mean like Emmitsburg, if you live on the East Coast, definitely go to Emmitsburg and visit. You can see the rock where Elizabeth Ann Seton taught sat and taught, or like Philly, I mean you could do the whole Northeast quarter and see lots of shrines, that is how I learned to fall in love with the city of Philadelphia.
Fr. Chase:It's one of the ways I learned to fall in love with Philadelphia because that was my focus assignment. My focus missionary assignment was Temple University 2007, 2009. It's a difficult city in many ways.
Joannie:I mean it's got a lot of problems. Every city has its problems. Philadelphia's named Brotherly Love and doesn't live up to its name most of the time.
Fr. Chase:But so my first year there as a missionary, I was just really struggling to find my way and my feet underneath me there.
Fr. Chase:But the Newman Center at Temple was awesome and there was a saint and a scholar of a priest who was the director of the Newman Center at that time, Father Sean Mahoney, and he just helped me, like, open my eyes to the fact that Philadelphia is a city of saints. You can walk out your front door and find your way to Katharine Drexel, John Neumann. You can get yourself in a car and go see Elizabeth Ann Seaton, you can go to the North American Martyrs Shrine and so, yeah, learning, learning for me, learning to love a place. So, even though I don't know where I'm from, I love many places and a large part of learning to love a place is recognizing the sacredness in your own backyard. And once you awaken to the sacredness in your own backyard, yeah, you have roots there, new roots, new love.
Joannie:And.
Fr. Chase:I also think that's one of the lessons pilgrimage is meant to teach. If you don't mind me sharing, a story.
Joannie:Yes, please do Not to just keep talking, no.
Fr. Chase:But so I went on the Camino de Santiago with a group of FOCUS missionaries and students in 2008, the summer of 2008. And my real desire going into that pilgrimage was I had come to a point where I thought I think it's time to apply for a seminary. I think that's where I am in my own vocational discernment. I'm ready to apply to a seminary program, but I don't know which one to apply for. I had been looking into religious communities, the Dominicans, the Jesuits I was thinking about. Well, is it supposed to be a diocese back in Alabama, where I'm from, in New Jersey, where I was going to school? So that just I didn't know where to go.
Fr. Chase:And so I went on the pilgrimage, hoping that would be the response that I got from God, like show me where to go. And the pilgrimage itself was, I found, very difficult, physically taxing, strenuous learning how to get along all the time with some of the other pilgrims. You know like you're there with other people and sometimes you have to learn how to communicate in their languages as well as your own. So it was in many ways a difficult trip and I walked away from it just thinking God didn't say anything to me.
Fr. Chase:I didn't get anything out of this, or if I did, I have absolutely no idea what it is, because I don't know what I heard.
Fr. Chase:And so I found it a little bit disappointing and depressing. And so when I got back home to Alabama, where my parents were at that time, my mom asked me like how it went and what I gained from it. And I said, honestly, I just don't know. And she said sometimes you got to go away in order to find the answers that are closest at home, already. And I thought that is probably true. Now, fun, fun after story. So she said that right, that was her wisdom. Sometimes you have to go away in order to find that some of the answers you're looking for are actually closest to home and not exaggerating.
Fr. Chase:The very next day my mom said you know, I was talking to some people at the parish about you and your pilgrimage and where you're discerning right now. And they wanted to know if you had ever heard of the Congregation of Holy Cross, which is the community that I'm a priest of now.
Fr. Chase:And I said, nope, never heard of them. I'm kind of not that interested in just getting to know a new group of people because I wanted it to be something I had already looked at Jesuits, Dominicans, dioceses so I said I haven't heard of them. Don't want to hear of them. No, thank you. So the next day.
Fr. Chase:Again like the day after that mom comes home and says you know, oddly, I was talking to a completely different group of people at the parish today. You came up, they said what's he doing? And they wanted to know if you had ever heard of this group, the Congregation of Holy Cross. So two invitations in two days and I said no. But I mean that's, that's odd, like I've never heard of them. But they're, they're coming up repeatedly.
Joannie:Twice is from the Lord, they say.
Fr. Chase:I looked yes, yes, Well that proved me the case because I looked into them and that was the first small step. And one thing led to another, and here I am, ordained nine years, eight years, eight years of priest in this community.
Joannie:Yeah.
Fr. Chase:I think. I think it was the grace, of the Camino, the pilgrimage was yeah. So I did receive a grace, but I didn't receive it in the way that I was expecting that I would, and so that's. That's another one of those difficult lessons that pilgrimage teaches you that God has gifts.
Fr. Chase:But not only are sometimes our hands too full already to receive the gifts God wants to give us. But God gives gifts in ways that surprise and delight and do things for us that we wouldn't necessarily have like planned out or imagined for ourselves, and it's probably better that way.
Joannie:Yes, it's interesting because we've talked on this podcast to a few other pilgrims at times who have gained lessons on pilgrimage and seem to have gotten those lessons right away. Like the day, like the day we go back, they already know like, oh God, taught me this through this, and I think it can be intimidating to think well, I went on a trip and I didn't get any answers, or I didn't do it wrong.
Fr. Chase:What's wrong with me?
Joannie:Right, and sometimes it's just the Lord either is working in a way you can't see and you might like years later you might look back and think, oh wow, he did that. Then, right, and just to be open, continually, be open to being surprised, and I love that that you know you just needed the grace because you did have to be open to hearing. It's like there were all these girls you already knew and somebody wanted to set you up on a blind date and you're like no, I want one of these.
Fr. Chase:I already know I don't want this new person because, yeah, discernment is everything's about relationships and relationship building. Yeah, yeah, put yourself out there new community.
Joannie:I have to get to know, but you were open to that through that grace that you didn't even know you were receiving.
Fr. Chase:It was a grace of being able to be open to it. Yeah, exactly, I love it.
Joannie:The Camino is kind of the pilgrimage right the way, and I think sometimes when we talk about pilgrimage, oftentimes we're talking about like going on a bus and going to all these beautiful churches and it. Those are beautiful pilgrimages, but the Camino is kind of in a league of its own with the. I think it's so much more interior that interior journey because you're you're traveling for sometimes weeks to one church right.
Joannie:To one tomb and it's that interior journey, I think, more than the physical, but the physical is part of it. I've never done the Camino. Would you agree that's the case that?
Fr. Chase:Yeah, the physical journey helps you trace some of those same paths in your own heart and your memory and your experience. And really there's a lot of time you spend on the road and there's a lot of silent time that you spend on the road and it's you confront yourself with yourself, and also with the people that you're with, and God's presence in your life and God's absence in your life.
Fr. Chase:We have a God who's both present and hidden from us, but that's because God transcends our ability to understand, but is also more interior to us than we are to ourselves. So, yeah, it's, it's a cross of sorts to have to like confront the mystery of ourselves and confront the mystery of God that way. But it's a confrontation that leads to life and it leads to peace, and it leads to joy. That's what it's supposed to lead at the end of the day.
Joannie:Yeah, we can't stress that enough the joy, because I think sometimes we do think of like this, the crosses of pilgrimage, but they all lead to resurrection. Right, God doesn't give us the cross that doesn't lead to resurrection. I'd like to transition and talk about Dante.
Fr. Chase:Yes, please.
Joannie:Because you're the Dante expert, at least in this room.
Fr. Chase:In this room maybe.
Joannie:I don't know, have you ever read?
Fr. Chase:him.
Joannie:I have read the comedy in college, so that was many years ago, so I'm somewhat aware of Virgil and you know all that good stuff.
Fr. Chase:But you have the people down.
Joannie:I guess I'll ask first, like why were you drawn to Dante? Because it's a lot to commit to something. Okay, I'm going to do this for my dissertation. Some people say don't do anything you love too much for your dissertation. I'm seeing the wisdom of that in retrospect.
Fr. Chase:You know, pursuing your passions is a great thing, but you'll also learn to hate your passion sometimes you have to commit that deeply. No, I am, yeah. So I mentioned a moment ago that I spent a study abroad semester in Rome and during that trip I thought maybe it would be good to try reading Dante. I hadn't before, Maybe I would try. And so I did. I read Inferno and just thought oh, this is great. You know, Inferno plays on the instincts we have to gape at car accidents.
Joannie:I think it's the same phenomenon Like why do we?
Fr. Chase:gape at horrible car accidents. It's just, there's something darkly fascinating about it and I think Inferno plays on that capacity for dark fascination that we have. So Inferno is great, Purgatorio a lot of the same sort of dynamics, a lot of the well like weird punishments that you know were not punishments at that point, but penances that people are making their way through on their journey to God still. But I got to Paradise, and this is terrible. I got to just the second canto, the second chapter of Paradise, Paradiso, and all of a sudden the storyline and the poetry changes and Dante's new guide, Beatrice, starts going off on this long winded disquisition on why the moon has moon spots.
Fr. Chase:And it's so complicated and so technical and you're out of your league. And I was reading this, I said this is terrible. What's, what's more? It's just not true. This just isn't true. Like we know that this isn't the case. And it was that it was going to the moon to celebrate Mass someday.
Joannie:Well, this is the tie in. This is the tie in.
Fr. Chase:So I remember reading Paradiso on a train in Austria and thinking this is not true, so I'm not going to continue with this.
Fr. Chase:So I interrupted, I stopped reading, I didn't read all the way through Paradise. So then I get to Notre Dame and I'm doing my seminary studies and my graduate level theology studies my Master of Divinity degree and I had a theology professor that knew that I had studied some Italian and had spent some time in Italy, and so he asked me for a research project for this class if I would be interested in taking up Dante and doing some sort of comparative work between the course material and the comedy, I said, oh, that sounds outside the box enough.
Fr. Chase:So I did it, and that made me have to read the poem all the way through when I read Paradise. So therefore I grinned, I gritted my teeth and bore it, and I read through Paradise and Paradise was a amazing parody. So it's my favorite of the three poems.
Joannie:Really.
Fr. Chase:It just had it to me, to my eyes at that time. It just shown, with this light and this life, that I thought this is exciting and there is truth here. This is true. It might not have been scientifically accurate in this part, because they're just. They have their own purposes writing this and they're operating from their own understandings, but this poem is light and it is truth.
Fr. Chase:And what is more, I enjoyed the research around it, like the secondary material that I was reading around the primary material. I found that as illuminating, as a luxury, so I actually had fun with the research, and so from there on out I said maybe this is something that I can keep up or try to push on with. And again, as with discerning religious life, one small step leads to one small step leads to one small step.
Fr. Chase:This one research paper on Dante led to some other stuff led to some other stuff, led to some other stuff, and now, yeah, I decided to get a PhD in it. I love it, theology degree, but focused on Dante.
Joannie:Yeah. So for those who haven't read the Divine Comedy, it's it's Virgil taking Dante through First Hell in the Inferno, then Purgatory, and then Beatrice takes him to Heaven. We call it the comedy because it ends in a marriage. It ends in happiness.
Fr. Chase:Yes, it's not necessarily hilarious and it ends really good, really good.
Joannie:So, like we have the Shakespearean comedies, and then they're not necessarily hilarious although they are but it's that they end in weddings right rather than death, and so that's why we call it the Divine Comedy. I think that's confusing for people who think it's going to be really funny.
Fr. Chase:That's exactly accurate, yeah.
Joannie:But so would you say that the Divine Comedy was a type of pilgrimage for Dante, then.
Fr. Chase:Very. It's one of the driving metaphors, explicitly so in the poetry. It's one of the driving metaphors Dante is. He wakes up to himself in the middle of the course of his life. It's the very first line of the poem Nelemenso del Camino Stravita. And in the middle of the way of our life, I came to myself in this dark, savage forest and I realized. I had lost the way.
Fr. Chase:And then he encounters Virgil, who says in order to reach the end of your life which is something good and true and beautiful, because it your life, the end of your life is seeing God face to face in order for you to reach that, we're going to have to take this threefold journey. You're going to have to take a threefold journey. I'm going to take you through the first two stages. I'm going to walk you through hell. You're going to see all the ways that human life and experience can commit itself to going wrong. You can see where you're in danger of committing your life that way and, seeing it, you're going to also learn how not to do that. And I'm going to walk you through purgatory and you're going to see all the ways that human life and the human spirit is recovering the goodness that God has planted in it all the way up the mountain. And then I'm going to hand you off and Beatrice is going to take you through heaven and you're going to see God.
Fr. Chase:And so pilgrimage is one of the driving metaphors for that journey, which is also very closely related to the theme of exodus and exile. So Dante is writing as somebody who ran into political trouble in his home country, Florence. He's from Florence 13th and 14th century, and he got caught up in political machinations between the political parties in the city at the time and the pope and the emperor at that time. He was a victim of some bad blood and bad faith, and he was exiled from Florence for the most of his adult life, and so he wrote this poem, as somebody who was forcibly on the road had no place to call home anymore, and so he's writing about life as pilgrimage, but from the experience of one who had himself become exiled and therefore could only hope to find a home in some place greater.
Joannie:And he's still exiled. His tomb in Florence is empty and he's buried outside the city and he chose to put certain people in the Inferno.
Fr. Chase:I think based on his own experience of yeah, people, the thing people I think get wrong pretty often about Inferno. People think that Dante puts his enemies there and his friends elsewhere. It's completely not true. Like it's it's a really tricky and complex question why the people that you find in hell are in hell? Because the people Dante meets in purgatory and the people Dante meets in heaven are, in many cases, worse sinners historically than the people Dante meets in hell.
Fr. Chase:And it's meant to shock you, like the people Dante meet. They're these characters. I meant to shock you because you realize, as you go along, some of these people, by our assessments and our standards of judgment, they should not be here. I would have put them someplace else, but they're not there. They're there, they're saved, but those other people aren't. So God's ways are not our ways.
Fr. Chase:God's judgments are not our judgments. And the thing that differentiates the people Dante meets here and the people Dante meets here is doesn't matter how bad a sinner you were. They accepted God's mercy as the truth of their life repentance. They accepted repentance as, the way of responding to that mercy, and that's all it took. There's one guy in purgatory who's there just because he lived the worst. He was a military commander, lived in the worst sort of violence his whole life and then, in his dying breath, shed a single tear of repentance and called on the name of Mary.
Joannie:And he saved. Oh beautiful, yeah, beautiful. I think we're going to be surprised if, God willing, we make it to heaven right by the grace of God. We're going to be surprised who we see there.
Fr. Chase:I think that is going to be the standard by which we are either there or not there. We're going to show up, we're going to be surprised, and the surprise will either be a scandal that we can't accept or a surprise of how good God actually is and we have a part to play in that.
Fr. Chase:It is part of Flannery O'Connor's literature too, of being caught off guard by the grandness of God's mercy. And if we can't allow ourselves to be caught off guard, then we're just going to be holed up in ourselves, and that's what Hell, to be ultimately, holed up in yourself is what hell would be like.
Joannie:Wow, that's really. It's so powerful. It reminds me of the parable of the vineyard workers, where some of the vineyard workers come at the very end of the day and get paid the same.
Fr. Chase:Yeah, I hate that because I feel the injustice, I feel the unfairness of it. I don't hate it. You know what I mean.
Joannie:Oh yeah, it's totally uncomfortable, right, and especially for like cradle Catholics or those of us who have tried really hard, and then we're like, oh wait, it's not really about how much I try, it's about the Lord, right, and I want everyone in heaven, and that's hard to say.
Fr. Chase:Everybody would say Lord, hear our prayer. But I would always think it's like, do I?
Joannie:actually really want that, do I?
Fr. Chase:actually want and I should. I feel like I should want that, but like, practically speaking, do I actually Right? I'm praying for?
Joannie:it, it's just it's.
Fr. Chase:But if you don't want that, how can you honestly Like hope for yourself if you can't hope for your neighbor, your brother or sister, no matter how bad they are, how bad they've got, because you're not better than them?
Joannie:You just. They're, but the grace of God, different. Yes, our sins are different and it's easy to oh my gosh, it's easy to think, to say that generally, without, if you don't think about people, and then when you think about individuals, you're like, oh, like, do we want to see I mean, I was just named a crazy, terrible person Do we want to see Stalin in heaven?
Fr. Chase:That's going to be really hard yeah.
Joannie:He's there and we're all assuming he's not.
Fr. Chase:And, honestly, on my worst days it doesn't even take a Stalin. It just takes the person who c with their mouth open. At the dinner table it's like do I want to sit next to you? Are you going to
Joannie:Oh yeah. Well, when we talk about our own growth and holiness, which we need you know that's how Augustine first used the word pilgrimage was that it was this pilgrimage of life and our own growth in the Christian life. And, and do you think, ante, I mean, could we apply that to the Divine comedy that, like the earthly life for these people is over, but do we still see that theme of that growth and holiness, and maybe it's the growth for Dante?
Fr. Chase:Yeah, it's mainly, I think, Dante's growth, as he has these experiences and human encounters along the way, and he sees both what he's capable of, both for bad and for good, and learns how to cooperate with the grace God gives him for spiritual growth, and but also especially, with the people Dante meets in purgatory. They're still on a journey themselves in terms of learning how to be in community with each other, learning how to take other people's good as more important than their own self interest, how to hold goods in common with each other, how to come alive in the virtues and the beatitudes as opposed to the vices and the sins that once drained life away from them. So they're also on a journey of growth and a journey of learning and learning how to remember their lives.
Fr. Chase:This is one of the best lines for me in the comedy. So Dante is in paradise, he's in, he's in the planet of Venus, because that's how paradise works. Or, like he, he ascends through the Ptolemaic spheres of the universe, the planets as they knew them in the Middle Ages, and he's in the planet of Venus. And he meets these people who were known in their lives for having been great lovers, but not like great caritas lovers, not great agape lovers like great erotic lovers.
Fr. Chase:They had, just like they didn't live within like sexual bounds and according to sexual more not talking about theology the body.
Joannie:We're not talking. Theology the body, yeah they were.
Fr. Chase:They were, some of them were poets, some of them were bishops, some of them were paramours. But he's talking to one woman in particular and he says isn't?
Fr. Chase:doesn't it hurt you to remember that, like this was your past, and she says we don't. In here in heaven, we look back on it all and we smile. We look back on the whole of our life, look back on the whole of everyone's life, and we smile because there is nothing of sin to be seen anymore. All that we see is God's mercy and providence working through everything, and that there's nothing left to do but to smile and to give thanks for that reality.
Fr. Chase:And so that gives me chills, like whenever I read it because I think, yeah, that probably is true. That is probably what heaven is like is to be able to look back on everything, or to see everything present and to know that it's something that is good and worth being joyful over and worth smiling over. It's hard to know how that's going to play out when we're in the midst of darkness and suffering. And the cross but at least in my religious community, Holy Cross, named after the cross, our Ave Crux Spes Unica "Hail the cross our only hope.
Fr. Chase:It's in it's holding on to the cross, in the midst of suffering and darkness, that we have the promise and the guarantee and the certainty of resurrection. And so, even in suffering, there can be joy, and oftentimes joy is going to be found in the form of compassionate co-involvement with the people that we find ourselves with.
Joannie:I think it's easy to look back at the cross to say, oh, God brings good out of evil because he saved us through the cross. But then when we look at our individual crosses, it's hard to believe some of them could be for our good and he's going to work good through the twists and the turns. And later we'll look back at the tapestry of our life and say, wow, if that hadn't happened. Even my own sin, right, right and in a mysterious way. I think it's De Sales. Francis De Sales is like you should actually love your own sin, because in that the Lord brings you humility, but he also can bring you closer to him.
Joannie:And it's a serious plan where we don't think we should have something evil, but yet the God works through good, even in our own sin, and even in that darkness and even in the suffering, eventually, like this pilgrimage, is it all going to work out in the end if we, if we trust in the mercy of the Lord and we continue to try to follow him. I think, you can use it all for good.
Fr. Chase:Even Julian of Norwich in her showings of divine love says something along the lines of our sins become the jewels in our crown in heaven, not to mean that the sins are sins, but it's to mean what all our sin is Is the darkness that God is drawing light out of. All our sin is is the dark reality that we're being seen through because there's a deeper truth of mercy carrying us to its heart, and that's the reality that is there in our crowns. But God allows that because there's actually something better and truer. We're actually going to be better and truer people on the other side of our sins than if we hadn't sinned to begin with, which is the theology the Exultet .
Joannie:Easter vigil. The happy fault of that mystery, such a mystery how it works, Like yeah, who knows, who knows.
Fr. Chase:And that is that is so to maybe make another Dante tie in. You know, a pilgrim is one who is In Via, like the name of your podcast, one who is on the way. A pilgrim is a homoviator in the language of Thomas Aquinas, a human being who is on the way of life, a traveler. But what we're aiming for is to become homo comprehensor human beings who see God face to face and see that light and that truth are wrapped up in the light and the truth and the love of who God is for us. So that's the end of it all.
Joannie:Yeah, Would you recommend? I know I need to read the Divine Comedy again and I think sometimes we think of it as like an exam. I thought of it as like it would be a good examination of conscience because I would look at the sins of the people and see it in my own life. But I'm beginning to think it's a better examination of conscience to see the Lord's mercy and to see like am I merciful to others?
Joannie:And but for the grace of God, there go I. And is there a translation you would recommend for those of us who can't read Italian?
Fr. Chase:Absolutely. There's a number of fantastic English translations. A go to here on the for students at the University of Notre Dame when they're studying Dante. A go to translation that's very good because it also has the Italian on one side and the English on another side is the Jean and Robert Hollander translation.
Fr. Chase:Hollander H-O-L-L-A-N-D-E-R Mandelbaum is a good translation. Kirk Patrick is a good translation If you love a translation that also holds on to the poetic like feel. You know there's always something lost in translation, but you know this is poetry over here. So if you want, like the, the feel of the poetry in English and also a deep appreciation for the theological nuance of the poetry, Robin Kirkp atrick is ideal for that.
Joannie:Well, thank you. Now we all have homework, Well yeah, comedy. Well, thank you, father. I want to end briefly as we wrap up with what we play at Verso, called High Low Disco. Oh, yes.
Fr. Chase:Yes.
Joannie:If you're I think I prepped you Would you rather do a high, low disco, so best you know, fun memory, not so fun memory, and then just a you know, high memory, low memory and just a fun silly memory. Would you rather do that for your Camino trip or would you rather do it for writing your dissertation, which in itself is a bit of a pilgrimage?
Fr. Chase:Let's do the Camino.
Joannie:Okay, okay. So if you could give us kind of a hype what was your high point of the Camino, maybe what was one of the low points of the Camino, and then we just a fun story, maybe that would inspire us or maybe not inspire us to go on the Camino ourselves.
Fr. Chase:The high point. Let's see the hype.
Fr. Chase:Well, maybe I'll better start with the low point because I already mentioned that like it was kind of an experience of not getting the grace that I thought I was going to get and having some real physical difficulties with it. Yeah, but the yeah, so the low point was kind of the disappointment of not knowing how God was speaking to me through it. The high point was then realizing in retrospect actually God has been walking with me this whole way and he has given me a grace that I didn't know how to feel at the time but has led me to this vocational discernment and the disco. Yeah, there were just a number of occasions where, you know, we showed up at a town one night and all the grocery stores and restaurants had already closed because it was a Sunday. So you know, there was no way to eat or anything and just had to be completely reliant on God to like help us find something.
Fr. Chase:And then two of our people went off just to see what they could find and just I forget how they found it, but they just came back to the in that night with like these bags and bags of like bread and cheese and meat, and it was an experience of God providing for us in a completely unexpected way.
Joannie:Yeah, I love those parts of pilgrimage and those lessons that then we can take back and be, like oh, maybe God does provide for me in my daily life too.
Fr. Chase:I just don't always see it so well.
Joannie:Thank you, Father, this was very enjoyable. There were other questions we didn't get to, so maybe you can come back or maybe you can you know you're off to England now, Is that correct?
Fr. Chase:That's right. Yeah, I'm going to do some postdoctoral work back there for a few months. That's exciting, yes, great.
Joannie:Well, safe travels.
Fr. Chase:Thank you.
Joannie:Thanks again for being on and thanks.
Fr. Chase:Thank you for having me.
Joannie:Thanks, listeners, for joining us and we continue to delve into the topic of pilgrimage. We talk to pilgrims who have gone on pilgrimage, we have tips for pilgrimage, so join us again on In Via, where we talk about navigating the pilgrimage of daily life. God bless!