The soul will always prove victorious.

AM Psalm 106:1-18 • PM Psalm 106:19-48
Lev. 23:1-22 • 2 Thess, 2:1-17 • Matt. 7:1-12

“If your child asks you for bread, will you give him a stone?” asks Jesus in today’s super-encouraging reading from the Sermon on the Mount. Recently, when our children in Washington, D.C. and Durham, North Carolina, told us they didn't have yeast for bread baking, my wife risked trouble with the postal authorities and mailed packets of the suspiciously pale powder to our children. She did not give them stones, and they have been texting back lovely photos of the breads they bake.

As we continue to be besieged by the coronavirus, it gets harder to keep anyone else’s spirits up, let alone our own, but we must keep trying. To encourage myself, I am memorizing Virgil's pep talk in Dante’s Inferno as he urges Dante (whose “aching lungs had been so milked of air [he] had to sit,”) to stand up and scramble up one more land-slidey hump through Hell on his long hard way to Paradise:

“Now you must rouse yourself, for never yet
has anyone come to fame,” my master cried,
sitting on cushions or under a coverlet.

He who consumes his life, when he has died
without fame, leaves the world with the impress
of smoke in the air or foam upon the tide.

Rise. Let your soul overcome your breathlessness,
for, unless the heavy body lets it fail,
the soul will always prove victorious.

— Translation, Michael Palma, 2002

And, to remind myself to imitate God’s and my wife’s maternal generosity by sending messages of encouragement to my friends and students across the social distances of this spring and the long hard summer ahead of us, I have begun repeating to myself the urgent and encouraging demand of Jesus in Matthew 7:12:

“Therefore, whatsoever you would have people do to you, do even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets.”

Written by John Tabb DuVal

John will be offering a course on Dante in Translation at the University of Arkansas next spring.