Father Joe Quotes

“Like the rest of Holy Week, Easter is also a terrific story. It starts as tragedy: the hero broken and bloody, against all expectation dead, his followers' joyful hope in him entombed with his corpse, the rock rolled into place, sealing their despair.

But the curtain doesn't fall there. The next morning at dawn they discover the rock has been rolled back. The tomb is empty, the body's gone! A missing corpse? Great stuff. A whisper of comedy. Now a touch of farce as Mary Magdalen and the guys chase frantically around looking for help, or the corpse, when suddenly, out of nowhere, up it pops—alive!

Of course it's Jesus, who's done the impossible and beaten death.

And they're so amazed they think he's the gardener! It's a payoff way beyond the Hollywood ending: all the flooding emotion and uplift of a tragedy followed by all the bubbling joy and optimism of a comedy.

Is that possible? Not just to live happily ever after but to die—and still live happily ever after? It's the most audacious claim of Christianity, the one element that marks the brand indelibly, that trumps the claims of all other major faiths.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“Remember: God's grief at the unspeakable things we do to one another is beyond measuring, but so is His mercy. It might seem a terrible thing to say to people who've lost and suffered so much at the hands of hatred and violence. But true courage is not to hate our enemy, any more than to fight and kill him. To love him, to love in the teeth of his hate—that is real bravery. That ought to earn people m-m-medals.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“I'm a little frightened, perhaps. We always are, aren't we? When we have to open a door that's always been there...but we've never opened. [...] I mean frightened by the immensity of what lies beyond the door. A God of Love--infinite and eternal. How could I ever be worthy of that?”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“Wittgenstein once said: the mystery is, why does the universe exist at all? ”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“You see, dear—I think there are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world up into two kinds of people... and those who don't.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“It was a music of the spirit, seeking peace, not emotional release, expressing the hunger of the soul rather than the heart. A way of sequencing notes so ancient it might be music's mother lode, its Fertile Crescent. It wouldn't have grated, I felt, on the ears of ancient Greeks or Egyptians or Mesopotamians or Sumerians—or even on the august auditory equipment of the Buddha or Lao-tzu.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“The only way to know God, the only way to know the other, is to listen. Listening is reaching out into that unknown other self, surmounting your walls and theirs; listening is the beginning of understanding, the first exercise of love.

None of us listen enough, do we, dear? We only listen to a fraction of what people say. It's a wonderfully useful thing to do. You almost always hear something you didn't expect. ”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“Hell is being alone for all eternity. Alone, unloved, unloving.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes."

"You speak in riddles, aged progenitor."

"The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or p-p-play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“The spiritual muscles I hadn't used for decades began to acquire some tone, and since they were Catholic muscles too, it was natural to look for a church to work out in.

It was hard. Appalling though the predations exacted on the monastic liturgy were, they were nothing compared to the desecration exacted on the secular. Latin was gone entirely, replaced by dull, oppressive, anchorman English, slavishly translated from its sonorous source to be as plain and "direct" as possible. It didn't seem to have occurred to the well-meaning vandals who'd thrown out baby, bath, and bathwater that all ritual is a reaching out to the unknowable and can be accomplished only by the noncognitive: evocation, allusion, metaphor, incantation—the tools of the poet.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“I was awake and this was reality, the new reality of nothing--and worse, of having to continue to exist.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“The other day Father Prior was telling me about a French writer, Jean-Paul Sartre. An existentialist. ... One phrase of his particularly struck me: 'L'enfer c'est les autres.' Do you think he meant that as a joke?"

"I don't think humor's a strong point with existentialists."

"I think it's p-p-poppycock. How can Hell be others? God is manifested in others. God is the Other. That's why the self must lose itself in love for the other. It's the self we must leave behind. Better to say Hell is the Self. L'enfer c'est moi.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“The ordinary was the divine, where common sense met mystery, where logic kissed the cheek of the inexplicable, the immeasurable, immemorial spirit throbbing like veins beneath the hard gray asphalt of quotidian life.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“Well, dear, the whole point of the mystical path to God is that it’s arduous. That’s why it’s often called the Way of the Cross. It takes years of dedication, hard work, and discipline, with few rewards. There are no shortcuts. Certainly not the coup de foudre you’re looking for. We leave that to the holy rollers. The trouble with being a holy roller is, it’s wonderful at the time, but what do you do the next day—and the day after that?”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Faith

“And what if this singular man in some unprecedented, unrepeatable way was in touch with the divine, was divine as claimed—which, with the evidence of Father Joe before me, did not seem quite so outrageous a claim as before? What if the story of the Resurrection was actually, factually true, not just an extra crowd-pleasing narrative twist but a once-in-the-planet’s-lifetime occurrence designed to demonstrate that there was hope after death and that the resurrectee was everything he said he was? Then the world and the universe would be totally different places. True good might even be attainable in life as well as the self-evident evil.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Faith

“Needing attention is a p-p-powerful force in the world, isn't it?"
"Absolutely. Most people would think of it as a very natural need. Almost a right."
"By 'natural' you mean 'm-m-morally neutral'?"
"Touché."
"Without God, people find it very hard to know who they are or why they exist. But if others pay attention to them, praise them, write about them, discuss them, they think they've found the answers to both questions."
"If they don't believe in God, you can't blame them."
"True, dear. But it still makes for an empty, unhappy person."
...
"Are you saying, Father Joe, that in the matter of motives, or even morally, there's not ultimately much difference between me and my targets?"
"I'm afraid not, dear. If the result is that you only have a personality other people shape. If you really exist only in other people's minds."
"I think you've just described celebrity."
"I've just described pride, dear.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“What you must ask yourself, Tony dear, is this: do you do the work you've chosen with joy and gratitude? Do you do it conscientiously? Do you do it for others first and yourself second?”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“If my belief in the God-force-principle-thing had faltered from time to time, it was completely reaffirmed that morning when I considered how completely brilliant a creation was fermentation. From decay came a pleasure sublime enough to keep decay at bay. Only for a few minutes, perhaps, but some minutes are like no others.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“Feelings trap us in the self, Tony dear. Doing a thing because you feel wonderful about it—even a work of charity—is in the end a selfish act. We perform the work not to feel wonderful but to know and love the other. It's the same with your romance. You may not feel your love, but God is still your loved one, your other.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“But does contemptus mean 'contempt,' dear? Of course not. That would imply arrogance, superiority, pride. So much that we call worldly is actually just flawed or being seen through a cracked lens. Imperfect or imperfectly understood. Who are we to judge as contemptible a thing or person whose existence God sustains? Everything, however imperfect, has its purpose.

No, Tony dear, contemptus mundi means 'detachment from the world,' seeing the world sub specie aeternitatis. Enduring or celebrating it, but never forgetting—even when it seems perfect and forever—that as the Bible says: 'all this shall pass like grass before the wind.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“It sounds to me, dear, as if your satirist is a bit like a monk. They both take a rather dim view of the world, and both try to do something about it."

"Thank you, Father Joe! I think I knew that once, but I'd forgotten. Contemptus mundi. We both have contempt for the world."

"You p-p-persist in your error, my son. Contemptus does not mean 'contempt.' It means 'detachment.' Are you detached from the things you satirize?”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“The Offices rerooted me in a tradition where, monk or not, I would always be at home. From long ago I knew the power of their repetition, the incantatory force of the Psalms. But they had an added power now. As a kid, the psalmist (or psalmists) had seemed remote to me, the Psalms long prayers which sometimes rose to great poetry but often had simply to be endured. For a middle-aged man, the psalmists' moods and feelings came alive. One of the voices sounded a lot like a modern New Yorker, me or people I knew: a manic-depressive type A personality sometimes up, more often down, sometimes resigned, more often pissed off, railing about his sneaky enemies and feckless friends, always bitching to the Lord about the rotten hand he'd been dealt. That good old changelessness.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ...if you approached the past generously, so to speak—its people as humans, not facts, as modern in their time as we were in ours, who thought and felt as we do, the dead would live again, our equals, not our old-fashioned, hopelessly unenlightened, and backward inferiors. Humanity, to be fully known, had to be seen as changeless as well as ever changing.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“History was a way to live extra lives, to cheat the limits of flesh and blood, to roll the rock back from the tomb and free the resurrected dead.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“To reject any vast group of one's cultural ancestors in the cause of some current theory is not just arrogance; it's posthumous mass murder. It's the same kind of thinking that makes genocide possible. The masses (albeit the dead masses) and the pathetic little lives they lived are irrelevant compared to this greater purpose we have at hand. Write them out of the record. They never existed.
...
One could not judge things by the brief span of one's own lifetime. That was at the core of modern arrogance: only my lifetime counts. My lifetime is 'forever.' Time before it and time after it do not exist. Everything of importance must come to pass in my lifetime. This is what drives the frenzy for change.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul