If Your Mind Wanders at Mass Quotes

“The Christian liturgy draws us deeper and deeper into the innermost recesses of mystery, but then lands us back out on the street. We are not allowed to stay at the altar. We have to go back out to committee meetings, traffic jams, laundry, dirty diapers—where we will be enacting what we have encountered in the liturgy.”
― Thomas Howard, If Your Mind Wanders at Mass

“By the same token, Christians find that, insofar as the “prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day” (the ordinary stuff of life) are taken and offered up to God in union with Jesus Christ’s own self-offering, they are transfigured—transubstantiated—and restored to us, not as the inert routines of the day, or as sheer, intractable adversity, or as boredom, which they might otherwise appear to be, but rather as vessels for grace.”
― Thomas Howard, If Your Mind Wanders at Mass

“The liturgy is at one and the same time a daily discipline as “do-able” as walking to the corner or eating our lunch, and the entry into the highest mysteries of heaven.”
― Thomas Howard, If Your Mind Wanders at Mass

“But we the faithful share in the action by uniting ourselves to the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ which is made present in the Mass, and by offering our adoration, and our very selves, and all our work and our joys and our sufferings, and our aspirations, to God as the particular things which we alone can offer. No one else can offer me to the Lord. This is an act which I alone can carry out.”
― Thomas Howard, If Your Mind Wanders at Mass

“Mass celebrated on the hood of a jeep with shells bursting all around is as much the Mass as the liturgy celebrated in St John Lateran by the Bishop of Rome himself.”
― Thomas Howard, If Your Mind Wanders at Mass