Quotes from Thomas Howard

When I walk into an Orthodox Church... one is immediately aware that one has stepped into the presence of what St. Paul would call the whole family in heaven and earth. You have stepped into the precincts of heaven!

But evil is always illusion. It insists on the lie that we can have something for ourselves. This is the sole principle at work in hell. Lucifer chose to believe it; or, since it is unimaginable that he actually could have believed it, then we may say that he chose to pretend it might be. Very well, says Truth, you may pretend this. But the pretense will be, literally, your undoing. It will unmake you. You will have opted for something that is not, namely, a lie. Hell is built of lies.

We are doing one of two things when we sing to our children. We are either indulging in a cynical duplicity that is only creating the conditions for disenchantment, or we are passing on to them, as we had passed on to us, something that the human imagination has sanctioned as being in some way perennially valid.

My life for yours: it may mean three seconds of my time to redeem some thoughtless bit of self-indulgence on the part of someone else, or it may mean, or did mean, Golgotha, where My Life for Yours was supremely dramatized and entails our eternal joy.

The old myth traveled upward and outward; the new travels downward and inward.

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.

I have been offered the noble opportunity to join my voice with that of the Crucified as He cries out, 'Father, forgive them.

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.

The Mass would be sterile and futile if it were locked and sealed inside one magic hour of the week. Like Calvary itself, the whole point of it is that it overflow. Our Lord's life (his Blood) was poured out, spilled onto the ground; and, says faith, from the soil on Golgotha it spread to cover the whole earth. Just so, you and I take our own place at Calvary so that our whole life may be spilled as an oblation to God for the life of the world.

We had come to this place to offer something to God, namely, the sacrifice of praise. I came to realize that there was more than a mere difference in phraseology between this and what I had always thought of as worship. There was a difference in vision.

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.

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.