“Yet last summer I was mired in despair. The cause was the failure of the expectation I had over my return home—a happily-ever-after hope that grace would forever bridge the fault lines between my family and me that had driven me to leave as a young man. It had not happened, even though I had done everything in my power to make it so. The disappointment was crushing, especially because I believed that the path to my own inner peace depended on taking the road back to my father’s house—not as a prodigal but as a son all the same.

No matter how far I had strayed from home, I never felt the pain of exile as I did last year—a pain exacerbated by my felt inability to steel my mind and marshal my will to master it.”

Rod Dreher (@roddreher) on “How Dante Saved My Life”.