Luke Mohan > Recent Status Updates

‘But to murder an innocent man is wrong,’ Chen Gong remonstrates.
‘I would rather defeat the world than have the world defeat me!’ Cap Cao snarls back.

As the saying goes, ‘Wise advice can counter the influence of treacherous officials, if and when it is needed.’

I serve the One who gives power, not the one who borrows it.

But instead she had run away… Taken on the aspect of a slave, and returned to her city to die. To die willingly, because she believed she could save her people by pouring out her blood for them.

When your mother and Eugenius accepted death… when Mari witnessed with signum and accepted her death… It wasn’t because they hated life, or because God required death… It was because they loved, Jurian. They loved God beyond everything else. And when your love is strong, you don’t fear… and you don’t waver.

Then we make our own destiny… And let history decide the right reading.

The world does not rise or fall at your behest, but if you have a responsibility, a duty, you cannot falter. Do all that you can, and pray as if you can’t.

Eugenius told me once that things can be true and a foreshadowing at the same time. Not like the pagan Oracle’s prophecies which are all smoke and shadow. Sometimes things happen that are mysterious and strange, and they also point ahead to other things that will happen, someday.

It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

Do not scorn the pity that is the gift of a gentle heart, Éowyn!

And it is not always good to be healed in body. Nor is it always evil to die in battle, even in bitter pain.

‘Come, Mr. Frodo!’ he cried. ‘I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well…’

Frodo looked again towards the Mountain. ‘No,’ he said, ’we shan’t need much on that road. And at its end nothing.’

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him… in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

There must always be people in the church who leave everything in order to follow the Lord, people who depend radically on God, on his bounty by which we are fed – people, then, who in this way present a sign of faith that shakes us out of our heedlessness and the weakness of our faith.

“Battle is vain why should we wish to live longer? Why should we not go to death side by side?“
“Authority is not given to you, steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death…”

Our praying can and should arise above all from our heart, from our needs, our hopes, our joys, our sufferings, from our shame over sin, and from our gratitude for the good.

‘Yet there are other men and other lives, and time still to be. And for me, I pity even his slaves.’

‘You are a stern lord and resolute,’ she said; ‘and thus do men win renown.’

God does not need all the forms of “art” but human beings do: to express praise, thanksgiving, and total bafflement about what it all means.

If some medieval liturgical destruction – Latin, art, music – has been removed from liturgy, the reason given is that the old thing no longer makes sense in the modern world; but in some cases, the old thing is really destroyed because its beauty competes with the centralized individualist’s importance among others…

Use one or two first-class hymnals for the repertory; make sure that the congregation learns simple, “primitive“ chants, hymns, and other music that can stand on its own without accompaniment; on a regular basis, singing at least some music without instrumental support; unplug the microphone…; Keep the repertory stable and “repetitive“.

Maybe… I had missed out on some of the confrontation it takes to begin the journey toward openness.

If you’re a kid, you’ve just got to stick your finger in a shark’s mouth.

Stanton: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; - Lincoln’s second inaugural address

I suppose if the twelve apostles were to be chosen nowadays the streaks of locality would have to be heeded.

…you’ve done your share of work anyhow, and it is time the youngsters were working for you. If you had nothing at all Julian and I would continue to take care of you and Ma and the girls; and you know that we would do it as cheerfully as you ever worked for us, and we would greatly prefer to do it rather than you should be wearing yourself out as now with labor and cares unsuited to your age.