Michael O'Brien: If creators of Christian culture hope to produce work...

Love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it. Love is also the seed and milk and the fruit of the world, though we can partake of it in greed or reverence. We are born, we eat, and learn, and die. We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare. I was here.

Michael O'Brien

greed song love-is

J.K. Rowling is a talented storyteller, but she has also used the style and technique of modern television and cinema media, which seizes the imagination by pummelling it, bombarding it with powerful stimuli, in a rapid pace, with plenty of emotional rewards.

Michael O'Brien

emotional media powerful

A rare objectivity and insight can be imparted regarding this world's struggle for spiritual integrity. In the land of Faerie, the reader may see his small battles writ large in the wars of titans or elves and understand for the first time, his own worth.

Michael O'Brien

spiritual integrity war

Solitude is the natural dwelling place of truth…It is there you will wrestle. It is there you will be tested by fire and by darkness.

Michael O'Brien

dwelling-place darkness fire

...life without coffee is not really life.

Michael O'Brien

coffee

Yet he saw that in all places there was originality, resulting from the human efforts at decoration and ingenious methods of survival.

Michael O'Brien

saws effort survival

Providence The will of God acting together with human will. But he respects our will absolutely. He does not force. Love never forces. It only invites. ... There is a war between good and

Michael O'Brien

liberty acting war

Corrupt fantasy points us, or forms us, in a consciousness that can lead to thinking that evil is good and good is evil. In the worst case, this may have long range effects, prompting the reader intuitively, subconsciously, to do evil while thinking they're doing good.

Michael O'Brien

good evil long thinking

I knew there would be some controversy over the 'Potter' series between religious people and secular-minded people - that was inevitable - what astonished me and continues to astonish me is the intense controversy that erupted very early on among Christians themselves, in all the churches. It cuts across every denominational line.

Michael O'Brien

some me inevitable people

Harry Potter represents a much larger wave of cultural revolution that we're all immersed in, and I believe it's a spiritual revolution as well - a negative spiritual revolution.

Michael O'Brien

revolution spiritual believe negative

There are indeed 'values' in the Harry Potter series, but they're confused with anti-values. Potterworld is a scrambled moral universe. There are Christian symbols in the series, but the author misappropriates them, mutates them, and integrates them into a supposedly larger and broader system where evil symbols are dominant.

Michael O'Brien

confused moral universe evil

My Catholic faith is my life. Any artist, if he is to be faithful to how he perceives the world and to the nature of his creative gifts, cannot divorce the two. To create is to love. To love is to create.

Michael O'Brien

nature faith love life

Love cannot long survive without truth. Nor is truth really truth unless it is integrated with love.

Michael O'Brien

survive truth love long

It goes without saying that a good Catholic novel should be good craftsmanship, good writing skills. The creative person must always be engaged in the long labor of perfecting the tools of his art. Yet the work itself need not be explicitly evangelical in its themes and plots.

Michael O'Brien

good work long art

Imagination is a screen onto which the evil spirits can 'project' images, temptations presented as stimulating entertainments, offering us pleasurable rewards if we give in to the temptation.

Michael O'Brien

project imagination temptation evil

We must become a people who are in submission, that is, submitted completely to the mission of the Church, 'in statu missionis.' Thus, living fully within the mainstream of grace, under the mantle of God's divine authority, and by uniting ourselves to the obedience of Christ on the cross, we participate in the reversal of Adam's sin.

Michael O'Brien

church grace god people

Genuine freedom is possible only where there is genuine love. And genuine love is not possible without truth.

Michael O'Brien

freedom truth love-is love

The Natural Law which God has written into our beings cannot be entirely eradicated, but it can be gravely deformed, leading to distortion of consciousness and conscience, and hence our actions.

Michael O'Brien

cannot conscience god law

Healthy fiction, no matter how wildly it may depart from the material order, teaches us to love ourselves in a wholesome manner by loving our neighbor. Indeed, even by loving our enemies - at least by trying to learn to love them, and by believing that it is right to do so. With grace this is possible.

Michael O'Brien

enemies grace matter love

Whether one is Marian or Charismatic or both, or prays in one or more of the many other ways open to us, it is all a flow of love, if the heart is truly speaking to and listening to the Holy Trinity. Personally, I pray the Divine Mercy chaplet every day. We pray the Rosary every day in our family.

Michael O'Brien

day family heart love

If creators of Christian culture hope to produce work that will bear good fruit, we must draw our life from the true source - our living Savior. He is real. He is present. But all too often we reduce him to an abstraction, giving him intellectual assent, but not our hearts.