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Image of the quote is loading... SaveSave 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. - Quote by Tony Hendra

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
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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
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
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
All evil begins with this belief: that another’s existence is less precious than mine.
Tony Hendra
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
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
Tony Hendra
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
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
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