Senior editor of The American Conservative magazine Rod Dreher spoke on Wednesday, Sept. 16, as the first speaker in UTM’s Academic Speaker Series for the fall 2015 semester.
Dreher is a journalist and writer whose work has appeared in Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The New York Post and The Washington Times, among others. He has also appeared on television and radio shows including NPR, ABC News, CNN and the BBC. Dreher has also authored three books which explore the topics of faith, family, place and the meaning of home in contemporary American life.
Dreher delivered a lecture entitled “Dante’s message in a bottle: The Astonishing True Story of How a Medieval Poem Saved my Life,” a story of Dreher’s personal struggle and how reading The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, helped him to overcome that struggle.
“I saw the most amazing thing in the middle of the worst crisis of my life, shipwrecked and lost, a message washed ashore in a bottle. That message was in the form of a 600 year-old poem,” Dreher said. “I read that message in the poem. In that message, I saw a map back home, where I really belonged; my true home. I’m beginning to see myself, through this poem, and the whole world through this enchanted work of art. It healed me. It restored me and it made me whole.”
Dreher went into detail about the early years of his life and his family. He talked about how he and his father were completely different in almost every way, and that he knew his family loved him, though he never felt quite accepted by them. As the years passed, Dreher built a life for himself in various cities, while his family stayed in the small town in which he grew up.
When his sister lost her battle with terminal lung cancer, Dreher made the decision to move back to his hometown in order to be closer to his family, but what he found was contempt and unresolved anger from his family. “It absolutely broke me. I went back home, and I realized, ‘I’ve thrown my life away. I’ve come back here out of love, and it was all an illusion. I will never be welcomed here.'” Dreher fell into a deep depression that lasted for months until his wife told him to seek help.
Dreher sought the help of a therapist, which he said he “didn’t take that seriously.” Dreher then said that he found a copy of The Divine Comedy in a bookstore and read the first canto of The Inferno, which compelled him to buy it. “I didn’t read it as a literary critic. I didn’t read it as entertainment. I read it like a man who was drowning and needed to grab hold of something to keep from dying. I read it very slowly and prayerfully, and I would take the things I would read about Dante to my therapist and to my priest.”
Dreher went into detail of how The Divine Comedy helped him to reconcile with his family and let go of his anger and anxieties. Dreher encouraged the audience to read the epic poem for themselves, calling it a “spiritual experience” and saying that it “would reveal many truths about the real world, as well as the spiritual.”
