Thomas Howard > Quotes

“The incarnation took all that properly belongs to our humanity and delivered it back to us, redeemed. All of our inclinations and appetites and capacities and yearnings are purified and gathered up and glorified by Christ. He did not come to thin out human life; He came to set it free. All the dancing and feasting and processing and singing and building and sculpting and baking and merrymaking that belong to us, and that were stolen away into the service of false gods, are returned to us in the gospel.”
― Thomas Howard

“The flesh,' as Saint Paul used the term, refers, ironically, not to our bodies but to fallen human nature. The 'carnal' spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblation to God. The carnal spirit is cruel, egocentric, avaricious, gluttonous, and lecherous, and as such us fevered, restless, and divided. The spiritual man, on the other hand, is alone the man who both knows what flesh is for and can enter into its amplitude. The lecher, for example, supposes that he knows more about love than the virgin or the continent man. He knows nothing. Only the virgin and the faithful spouse knows what love is about. The glutton supposes that he knows the pleasures of food, but the true knowledge of food is unavailable to his dribbling and surfeited jowls. The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical. They may look alike and weigh the same. The different lies, rather, between one's being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, even nonphysical things like fame and power, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to their Giver.”
― Thomas Howard, Evangelical Is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament

“Everything depends on what is being enacted. Enactment itself, since it is almost synonymous with ceremony, is, as we have seen, part of the very fabric of our human life. We do enact things. We will enact things. No on can stop us from enacting things. The most gaunt anti-ceremonialist may refuse to take off his hat in a shrine, whereupon he has given the whole game away. He agrees with the priests at the shrine that hats on or hats off are significant, and to register his dissociation from their cult, he keeps his on. It is a ceremonial enactment of what he believes. A church wishes to stress the table aspect of the Eucharist, so it instructs its people to remain seated as they eat the bread and drink the cup. This is a ceremonial enactment of something important to them. They agree with the Christians who kneel that posture is immensely significant. The external act matters; stay seated.”
― Thomas Howard, Evangelical Is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament

“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.”
― Thomas Howard, Evangelical Is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament

“The old myth traveled upward and outward; the new travels downward and inward.”
― Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance? A Critique of Modern Secularism

“the general fund of vocabulary, nay, of discourse itself, so calamitous that the failure of the banks in 1929 seems paltry by comparison; so that we find verbal paupers all around us, tattered, emaciated, and reduced to the stark penury of such verbal resources as “It’s like wow” or using “interface” or “office” as verbs.”
― Thomas Howard, The Night Is Far Spent: A Treasury of Thomas Howard

“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.”
― Thomas Howard, Chance or The Dance?

“Its [Narnia's] fabric is shot through with glory. There is no peak, no valley, no sea or forest, but bears the weight of this glory, no law of the land that does not mirror the exact pattern of this glory, no spell or incantation or taboo that does not reach through the veil that protects the mundane and the obvious from the great glories and mysteries that press upon them. No creature - no faun, dryad, star, or winged horse - that does not bear about and exhibit in its own form some bit of the shape of that glory. And, alas, there is no evil that does not turn out to be fraud, parody, or counterfeit of that glory.”
― Thomas Howard, Narnia And Beyond: A Guide to the Fiction of C. S. Lewis

“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.”
― Thomas Howard, The Night Is Far Spent: A Treasury of Thomas Howard

“The commonplaces of household life are parts of the rite in which we celebrate the mystery of Charity—and it is indeed a mystery, full of outrageous absurdities like obedience being a form of liberty, self-denial a form of self-discovery, giving a form of receiving, and service a form of exaltation. Politics boggles at mysteries like this; but in Christian households the hunch is that they are all clues to what the Real Drama is about.”
― Thomas Howard, Hallowed Be This House: Finding Signs of Heaven in Your Home

“I have been offered the noble opportunity to join my voice with that of the Crucified as He cries out, 'Father, forgive them.”
― Thomas Howard, On Being Catholic

“Do they not both mean “I owe this to you and I acknowledge it gratefully”? In the one case it may be a button sewed on or a door held open. In the other it is salvation. By getting accustomed to this simple, routine way of acknowledging our debts to each other, are we not thereby getting accustomed to what the City of God is like?”
― Thomas Howard, Hallowed Be This House: Finding Signs of Heaven in Your Home

“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

“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

“To be Catholic . . . is to live one’s whole life ‘in’ the gospel”, “to rest one’s case in the pierced hands of Jesus Christ the Savior”; “to think of oneself as having been adopted into ‘the whole family in heaven and earth’ as St. Paul teaches”, “to be profoundly conscious of one’s place in an immensely ancient tradition . . . that stretches back to the beginning”. It is to have been set free by Christ for “the Dance” called Charity—with its healing rules of renunciation, self-mastery, and virtue, and its fruits of freedom and joy, glimpsed in the Beatitudes. “The image of Christ. That is a very taxing assignment”, our configuration to Christ. “To be Catholic is to confront all of this in the presence of the Crucifix.”
― Thomas Howard, On Being Catholic

“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

“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.”
― Thomas Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament

“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

“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 myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything.”
― Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance? A Critique of Modern Secularism

“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.”
― Thomas Howard