Luke Mohan > Recent Status Updates

“No, no! It is not the pain that is pleasing to God, child. It is the soul’s endurance in faith and hope and love in spite of bodily afflictions that pleases Heaven.”

“All of them say,’Doctor what can I do?’ And what am I supposed to answer? Say nothing? Say,’You can die, that’s all.’ What would you say?”
“‘Pray’”
“Yes you would wouldn’t you? Listen, pain is the only evil I know about. It’s the only one I can fight.”

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty;

“Where’s the truth? What’s to be believed? Or does it matter at all? When mass murder’s answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is the bloodier.

To protect the old buildings against the encroachment of a more impatient architecture, new additions had been made outside the walls and even across the highway—sometimes at the expense of convenience.

His nature impelled him toward action even in thought; his mind refused to sit still and contemplate.

But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For there would have to be infinite love as well.

Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think—as long as they don’t seize the error hungrily because it has pleasanter taste.

For man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and could die with a race or age…Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.

And he [the devil] was evil merely because he had made a denial of the Good, and the denial had become part of his essence, or a hole therein.

“Look at him and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization? What do you see?”
“The image of Christ, what did you expect me to see?”
“The incongruity. Men as you can observe them through any window, and men as historians would have us believe men once were.”

And then the king would say: “Come,” or the King would say: “Go,” and only for that moment had the tedium of years existed.

We should by no means despise the stimulation of sensible devotion when it helps us to do whatever we have to do, with greater humility, fidelity and courage.

A world is supported by four things… the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing… without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.

I can remember the days when the farmers and the laborers would come from miles around to attend Vespers in a Benedictine monastery.

Not long ago, in nearly every middle-class living room there was a piano… In today’s living rooms we find an elaborate stereo system, not a piano, and the children are much too busy with video games, text messaging, gymnastics classes, and so on to be bothered with piano lessons.

Of course, the unstated and thoroughly embarrassing fact here is that the people love packages and ribbons and gold and things they do not completely understand.

[Karl Rahner] states that … the sort of music identified with Christian worship for centuries, especially compositions by the great masters, is alien to true liturgy.

“Start from scratch,” he advised his students; the past has nothing to offer.

Rarely was there an atmosphere of deeply prayerful involvement.

they can instinctively detect “poor or altogether inappropriate selections of prayers, readings, and especially music,” which they might protest by not singing.

The liturgy often does not seem to proceed with its own inexorable logic; instead the sacramental Mass recedes into the background while, in the foreground, hospitality moments and musical “happenings” are aggressively prepared for your enjoyment.