Cold weather can’t stop those notorious sidewalk chalk vandals!

Finding that their arsenal of chalky pigments had dwindled to mostly pinks and oranges, our monastery hoodlums turned to Dante’s celestial rose for their inspiration in the waning daylight of 2020. After a year full of apocalyptic events, rhetoric, and distress over much of the world, our sight strained past the bounds of this broken world to catch a heavenward glimpse of the glory that awaits and endures.

At the end of his Paradiso, the third volume of the classic Christian epic The Divine Comedy, Dante describes the Empyrean, where we can see all the angels and saints in glory, arrayed in ranks and choirs and divisions like so many petals of a tremendous, radiant rose, the center of which is the ineffable brilliance of the Holy Trinity Himself. Everyone has their place in heavenly bliss, gazing upon God in wonder and ecstasy: the saints of the Old Covenant who awaited the coming of Christ; the saints of the New Covenant who have followed the Lamb down through the ages; apostles, martyrs, virgins, statesmen, laity… all are represented.

Our intrepid chalk artists, awed but undaunted in their resolve, attempted to capture at least a tiny bit of this grand vision. They were limited not only by color palette but also by time; the bell called us forth to Evening Prayer before the outer petals of the celestial rose could be populated! Nevertheless, its radiance was a beacon of joyful hope for the whole community as together we make our pilgrim way toward that eternal bliss.

(A few years ago, several of the nuns in our community took a DVD course on Dante’s Divine Comedy, taught by Anthony Esolen and provided through the Catholic Courses. His new translations of the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso are tremendous!)

Standing above the light surrounding me
I saw in far more than a thousand rows
the mirroring of the souls that had returned

To Paradise: and if the lowest sill
drinks in so great a light, how grand must be
the utmost petals of the heavenly rose! … (Canto 30)

In the form of a white and lucent rose
the holy soldiers were revealed to me,
the saints whom by His blood Christ took to spouse;

Meanwhile the second host who fly, and see
and sing the glory of Him who stirs their love,
and sing their Maker’s liberality

Who made them for such glory, as a drove
of bees enflower themselves again, again,
returning where their labor is made sweet,

Into the many-petaled flower come down,
and from its leaves they rise again and go
where their Love dwells in day forevermore. …

So I did search through all the levels now,
taking my way in living light on high,
above, below, and circling round. I saw

Faces persuasive in their charity;
Another’s light and smile adorn their eyes;
their acts are graced with every dignity. … (Canto 31)

O overbrimming grace whence I presumed
to gaze upon the everlasting Light
so fully that my vision was consumed! ...

Within that brilliant and profoundest Being
of the deep light three rings appeard to me,
three colors and one measure in their gleaming:

As rainbow begets rainbow in the sky,
so were the first two, and a third, a flame
that from both rainbows breathed forth equally. (Canto 33)