Luke Mohan > Recent Status Updates

He composed a prayer for himself and said it daily: ‘O God, I thank thee that thou hast heard all my prayers and I pray thee that thou wilt forgive me for all my sins and that the hymns may be nice, and that I may attend today and ever hereafter. Amen.’

By…shameless and inept experiments is the mastery of a very difficult language achieved.

What Ethel brought was of another order. She brought the fresh air of loch and moor… the sense of gaiety and humor where before there had been only recreation and wit.

One does not originate the [divine] locution. God speaks and enlightens. Man receives.

Until one is purified sufficiently, he will experience God, not in deep enjoyment, but in a dark desire and yearning.

He [God] contacts us through the effects he produces in our being.

Until we provide satisfactory answers to the question “How does the Spirit speak?”…How can anyone be so sure he is listening to the Spirit and not his own ideas and desires?

Religious experience as the final criterion of truth is, of course, the Protestant position.

Philosophers have long noted that error proximately is due to an extension of one’s judgement beyond evidence.

The religious who seeks the joys of two worlds and avoids the sacrifices of both of them is inauthentic

The action of pity will live forever: but the passion of pity will not. The passion of pity, the Pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be considered and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty – that will die.

Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.

Why should we put our autonomy aside, why should we “empty ourselves” for this act of worship when the man up front… is not doing that sort of thing?

A Latin mass used to be a form of existentialist tension, in which the worshiper was caught in the paradox of anguish and assurance, the unknowable and the familiar, the enigmatic and the logical – but that is what the spiritual life is all about.

The extraordinary religious act called the mass required extraordinary language.

There is so much to be learned from [the high mass]... I am not referring primarily to the old language or the old music at that liturgy but to the old virtue of humility…

The dreamy, casual “Voice of God“ song, without the addition of phrases like, “the Lord said,“ is a radical break with Jewish and Christian tradition.

During the Latin mass “congregational participation” sometimes reached human beings (and helped them to “do good“) not through their craniums but through another part of human anatomy – their gut instincts.

Latin is largely avoided today in Catholic parishes and chapels not because of progress or the church’s new image of itself or the need for greater participation but because so many of Catholicism‘s influential leaders (clergy and laity) no longer believe in an “awesome” God who has entered into history in an “awesome” way.

A pre-Vatican II church emphasized that the Eucharist, the Mass, was a gift to the human race; the liturgy and art that surrounded it were symbols of gratitude for this unending gift. A postconciliar church, in some places, seems to be emphasizing that human beings are the gift…

Maybe some of them… are longing not for Latin but for the low stress of the old low Mass.

That austere formality of the old Latin rituals sometimes used to encourage much more intense commitment and much more respect than the typical parish’s breezy version of the “new” mass, and the liturgical specialists know this.

Latin rituals invited everyone… to reach for an emotional and spiritual level above the commonplace.

Knowledge (“pure “and as “objective“ as possible) is power. Knowledge of authentic cultural “roots” is helpful for inner strength and self-esteem. Knowledge corrupted as dishonest religious or ethnic propaganda is a form of thumbsucking.

In the best examples of church art (something simple or magnificent) you will always find a disciplined coherence, the impression that the “artist”…has happily submitted to the rules of a “higher authority”…the coherence of a style.

The quasi-military American church was putting excessive emphasis on defending the faith with cold logic, with memorized formulas from a catechism.

There can be no “sticking together” and no distinctiveness without a cultural heritage that defines just how one group is not the same as another. (Customs, traditions, food, art, music, poetry, literature…)

As he grew older he seemed to be ever less and less a philosopher, and to talk more of eloquence and figures and poetry.

I now determined that I would always go veiled… It is a sort of treaty with my ugliness.

My terror was the salute that mortal flesh gives to immortal things.