Luke Mohan > Recent Status Updates

The Christian faith had been to him a power like the king and the law of the land – he knew that it was to govern his life, and he bowed to it, without reluctance, with reverence and with the recognition that a man must be loyal to all these things if he was to be able to meet his equals, and look them freely in the face without shame.

God sees my heart, and he knows it. But he knows, too, I ween, that the hardest thing you can require of a man is that he shall not avenge his kinswoman’s honour with the sword… I tell you, Olav, the man who can forgive such a thing from his heart, him I would call a Holy man.

Book 2: The Snake Pit begins. Book one was of good quality, with most of Olav’s character development coming in the last 50 pages. Ingunn was the main character, and not an overly sympathetic one at that.

A beautiful confession. “Think you then that the load which your friend has laid upon you is so heavy that you are not able to bear it—a Christian man and His man?”…
“Nay. Nay, I think not that—“

Prayer before confession: “God my Lord, give me discretion to say what I have to say and no more and no less.”

“Men and women must bear resolutely what they have brought upon themselves—“ Olav to Ingunn

On suffering, penance

It is an easy matter, Olav, to be a good Christian so long as God asks no more of you than to hear sweet singing in church, and to yield Him obedience while He caresses you with the hand of a father. But a man’s faith is put to the test on the day God‘s will is not his.

“ You know well, Olav, that motherless and friendless you are not–no Christian man is that. You, as we all, have the mightiest brother in Christ, our Lord, and his mother is your mother–and with her, I trust, is she, your mother who bore you. I have always thought that the Lady Sancta Maria prays yet more to her Son for those children who must grow up motherless year below than for us others.”

Comments on the reasons for requiring a public marriage

It dawned on Olav the while that he who has once left the straight path of honor soon finds himself in broken ground, where he may be forced to many a crooked leap.

I’m hooked. Undset’s writing is just as captivating as I remembered.

"The struggle of the spirit in this world is never wholly won and never quite lost."

These were his people, and he was their voice, their hands uplifted to God.

"Remember...that we should know as much of our past as we can so that we may not make the same mistakes over again, and that the good that men have won with so much labor should not be lost."

"I always use what I have. If it is something to give, I give it; but if it is something to be asked, I ask it. Poverty is an opportunity to serve the Lord as much as wealth."

"I have dreamed of doing in the eighteenth century what Saint Hugh did in the eleventh. Now I know that I shall not do it. But there is work to be done in Saint Hugh's spirit in the nineteenth century, if not in his house or in his habit, then in a humbler one. This is the work of my generation, and please God, I shall try to do it."

"Romance has fallen on evil days."
"...I don't suppose history has ever been very romantic to its makers, or perhaps, to be more accurate, to its agents....We are not fighting this battle because we wanted to be knights in shining armor or anything else. It is simply something that must be done, and we here in France have the first chance to do it. If we win, it will be for all Christendom...There is no alternative."

"Liberty, equality, and fraternity are still a dream. I think they must be so as long as men try to realize that dream by violence and without regard to God, whose grace alone can give it reality. But sought in the love and the knowledge of God, those three words constitute a great ideal, and with France and the Church working together they can, I believe, be realized."

"when you are as old as I am you will have learned that God gives men and women grace to live harder lives than we should have thought could be borne."

"I suppose it is for the good of our souls, who have been used to knowing to whom to apply when in need of some concession from authority, to have to take our place in the helplessness of the great mass of men who know not where to turn when they feel the pressure of power."

"I do not think the persecution can last forever...religion will be restored not by fighting but by the faith and patience of the people."

"I am a plain main, M. le Curé. I can see only what is before me. For the distant future, you may be right, but I shall be dead then...It is now that I am going to do my duty to my God and my province. He will take care of the future."

when Michel asked her what she thought could be done to revive Christian fervor and form again the ranks of the believers before he must leave them, she smilingly reminded him that martyrdom was a great honor to which no young man should rashly aspire.

It sounds beautiful as you put it that way, but I am sure that the doing of it would be hell. We have hatred and greed and violence now. There is flame enough. What we need is light.

...to throw off the authority of the universal Church on any pretext was not to avoid the weakness of men, for that was wherever men were. It was, rather, to forfeit the strength of the unity of the Church.

Even as he prayed, he smiled to himself. The contrast between the great battlefield and the little was so grotesque.