Tony Hendra > Quotes

“All evil begins with this belief: that another’s existence is less precious than mine.”
― Tony Hendra, Messiah of Morris Avenue

“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

“People buy pathetic substitutes for community—sound waves in a speaker, particles bombarding a screen—all pretending to be friends or the folks next door. The vacuum they leave when the screen goes dark, when the recording ends, is filled with a loneliness worse than ever before.” “What’s the answer?” “Flesh and blood touching flesh and blood. Life touching life. Yours, mine, everybody’s.”
― Tony Hendra, The Messiah of Morris Avenue: A Novel

“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

“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

“Evil is caused by selfishness, by people acting out of the belief that they and their needs are paramount. And just because our first and only commandment is love, the diametric opposite of selfishness, doesn’t mean that we’re going to save people from the consequences of their selfishness. If you force the vast majority of people to live in squalor so you can live in splendor, you’ll bring on the Black Death. If you allow the rise of a homicidal maniac like Hitler because you see him as a way to beat down those who want equality and social justice, he’ll start killing people. Don’t blame God.”
― Tony Hendra, The Messiah of Morris Avenue: A Novel

“For him, a universe imbued with the divine was not something to make you bow down but something to reassure you. The divinity of all things is normal, not awesome.”
― Tony Hendra, The Messiah of Morris Avenue: A Novel

“Wittgenstein once said: the mystery is, why does the universe exist at all? ”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Last time I said something perhaps I shouldn’t have, something that’s been taken the wrong way: “The poor are always with you.” At that moment, back then, I wanted my friends’ attention. I meant I was going to die soon, but they would have the rest of their lives to care for the poor. But the rich have twisted my words to mean something quite different: that there’s nothing you can do about the poor. That the poor are part of life, like disease or accidents or hurricanes or getting old. Poverty is natural. You’ll never get rid of it, so forget about trying. Don’t worry that the poor have so much less than you do. Go eat your big meal, go drive your big car, go sleep in your big house. Let the poor look in the windows. Jesus says it’s OK. Well, Jesus doesn’t say it’s OK. OK? P”
― Tony Hendra, The Messiah of Morris Avenue: A Novel

“Pastor Bob’s breakthrough twenty years earlier had been the discovery that while Americans were hungry for spiritual nourishment, they wanted it bland and easy to digest—the religious equivalent of fast food. All that New Testament stuff about self-sacrifice and forgiveness puzzled them mightily. So Pastor Bob preached the Christian virtues of feeling good, relieving stress, getting rich, and hiring abundant deadly force to protect the good people from the bad.”
― Tony Hendra, The Messiah of Morris Avenue: A Novel

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Blessed are the generous, for they know their riches belong to others. Blessed”
― Tony Hendra, The Messiah of Morris Avenue: A Novel

“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