March 2022

Sovegna vos, a temps de ma dolor
“Be mindful, in due time, of my pain”
–Dante Alighieri, “Purgatorio”

The lines above, from the “Purgatory” section of Dante's “Divine Comedy” were a touchstone for the poet T.S. Eliot. He includes the line in its entirety as the epigraph of his most famous poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He also uses the shorter form –Sovegna vos, “be mindful”– as a refrain in his other famous work, “Ash Wednesday.”

I first began reading T.S. Eliot in college, as an assigned lesson. I never really warmed to his whole catalog, but I became interested in both his own influences, and on the impact he had on other writers. I remember reading “Ash Wednesday” as I was working as a hospital chaplain. Like Eliot, I chose to use the quote from Dante in one of the papers I had to write during the course of my training program. As someone who was learning, firsthand, the depths of pain afflicting the individuals I was serving in the psych ward, the substance abuse treatment program, and the PTSD clinic, this spoke to my experience. I was learning to be mindful.

My supervisor, however, saw a deeper lesson. He, as one who was responsible for the preparation and training of chaplains, was mindful of our pain: all the hurts and injuries we carried with us, from our lives and our work. He urged us to look more closely at those, both as a way to begin our own process of healing, but also as a means to find commonality with those we understood as different than ourselves.

This one line of poetry -written in Italian in the Middle Ages, translated numerous times into many languages, referenced by an American in the early 20th century, and reflected on by chaplains in the 21st- contained the essence of our Lenten journey. It is no mistake, Eliot used it in “Ash Wednesday,” which is concerned with the struggle for faith, forgiveness, and salvation. Lent calls all of us to be mindful of our own pain, and that of others; to be mindful of all the things that seem to separate us from God. As we begin our journey, from Ash Wednesday to the empty tomb, what are you being called to be mindful of? In what ways will that attention impact our common life as Christians? Join us on March 2nd, as we prepare ourselves for these coming 40 days.

- Pastor Jon