Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Richard Rohr, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Richard Rohr quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 361 Richard Rohr quotes for you to read and share.

Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000002464
The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000009770
Contemplation, sadly, helps you see your woundedness! That's why most people do not stay long with contemplative prayer, because it's not very glorious. It's a continual humiliation, realizing, Oh my God, I did it again. I still don't know how to love! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000020436
Someone has said, 'To be a saint is to have loved many things' - many things
the tree, the dog, the sky, the flowers, even the color of someone's clothing.
You see, when you love, you love, and love extends to everything all the time and everywhere. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000029015
Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000030991
We don't think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000035477
Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000035923
People who've had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don't know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000053002
There is a part of you that is Love itself, and that is what we must fall into. It is already there. Once you move your identity to that level of deep inner contentment, you will realize you are drawing upon a Life that is much larger than your own and from a deeper abundance. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000060844
Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality. Mere inspiration can never do this. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000061055
Seventy times seven is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000064647
In solitude, at last, we're able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined - by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000072755
If I'm going to continue to be any kind of spiritual teacher, I've got to go deeper myself. And so for me, [I am] preserving long periods of solitude, silence, prayer, journaling, study, writing. I don't turn on music or the TV unless I really need to. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000092849
Without transformation, you can assume you're at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000096045
Salvation is not a divine transaction that takes place because you are morally perfect, but much more is an organic unfolding, a becoming who you already are, an inborn sympathy with and capacity for the very One who created you. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000100576
Egoic consciousness is the one we all normally operate with, until we are told there is something else! Every culture teaches egoic consciousness in different ways. At that level it is all about me, my preferences, my choices, my needs, my desires and me and my group as the central reference point. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000104855
His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000110124
Think of the cold Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, or the monk who tries to eliminate all humor in The Name of the Rose, or the frowning Koran burners of Florida. Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000114922
And we must - absolutely must - maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000114982
The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000115459
To give, and not demand that others receive ... that is the crossover point to maturity ... -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000125765
I am who I am in the eyes of God-
nothing more and nothing less. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000131670
The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000137483
Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000146602
It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000150805
We have been shown how to fight hate without becoming hate ourselves. We have been given a Companion and a Friend and not just a good idea. We have been given joy in the midst of failure, and not just a way of winning or being right. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000152757
Love is luring us forward ... to the fullness of our own being -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000155609
Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000158220
The way to transmute the pain of life is to reveal the wounded side of things, evil, even, and then place the wound inside of sacred space. The Bible is about naming, facing, and then forgiving the wounds of history. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000160959
Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000163745
Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000165010
If you can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then you will find that when you speak, your words will be more well-chosen and calm. Francis -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000168683
One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing and action. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000176244
All mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000179929
Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000181398
How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess? -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000193317
Love is the source and goal, faith is the slow process of getting there, and hope is the willingness to move forward without resolution and closure. And these are indeed, 'the three things that last' (1 Corinthians 13:13). People who have these gifts - faith, hope, and love - are indestructible. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000197809
Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000198545
It's not correct to say Jesus is God. Now, don't run and report me to the bishop, all right? It's not correct to say that - Jesus is the union of the human and the divine. That's different. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000206254
You have to find some way to not become a cynical or negative person, a person who keeps walking around and opening your eyes in the outside world but inside you close down, a person who stops expecting tomorrow to be better than today. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000209469
Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000212355
The most effective organizations, I am told, have both a "good boss" and a "bad boss," who work closely together. One holds us strongly, while the other speaks hard truth to us and sets clear goals and limits for us. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000212825
Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000219997
All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000223857
The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000226530
You normally have to let go of the old and go through a stage of unknowing or confusion, before you can move to another level of awareness or new capacity. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000233342
Your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26). -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000234435
It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000237081
If you stay in the mainstream of life, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we're in our middle years, when we've experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000239344
The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance, not one or the other, but always both at the same time. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000239777
There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000240219
This earth indeed is the very Body of God, and it is from this body that we are born, live, suffer, and resurrect to eternal life. Either all is God's Great Project, or we may rightly wonder whether anything is God's Great Project. One wonders if we humans will be the last to accept this. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000242026
It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000242185
Loving God, allow me to be a sheep at least once in a while, and never let me forget that most of my life I have been a goat. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000245457
Our temptation now and always is not to trust in God but to trust in our faith tradition of trusting in God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000248003
As Desmond Tutu told me on a recent trip to Cape Town, We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000266656
One time, a Protestant minister said, "We made Jesus blonde haired and blue eyed and very cute. We made Jesus somehow a much more feminine figure." And there's probably truth to that. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000272513
Life is all about practicing for heaven." p 101. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000275152
We do not handle suffering. Suffering handles us. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000282673
There is no straight line to Goodness, to Love, or to God. And thank God, Grace is always retroactive. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000285687
If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000289388
We find it hard to love imperfect things so we imagine God is just as small as we are. If we expect or need things to be perfect or to our liking ( including ourselves) we have created a certain path for a very unhappy life. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000297786
You come to God not by being strong, but by being weak; not by being right, but through your mistakes. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000300047
Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000302907
If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000304164
We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve "the problem of evil," yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is the "problem of good." How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000308142
In this negative frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is "unworthiness" itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000314943
You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000324777
The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000336631
This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000338324
Heartbreaks, disappointments and even our own weaknesses can serve as stepping-stones to the second half of life transformation. Failings are the foundation for growth. Those who have fallen, failed or 'gone down' are the only ones who understand 'up.' -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000342666
Great love is always a discovery, a revelation, a wonderful surprise, a falling into "something" much bigger and deeper that is literally beyond us and larger than us. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000354004
Forgiveness always heals; it does not matter whether you are Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Jewish. Forgiveness is one of the patterns that is always true, it is part of The Story. There is no specifically Catholic way to feed the hungry or to steward the earth. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000355621
The Gospel gives our suffering personal and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others, and finally, by connecting us to the very pain of God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000356062
If our love of God does not directly influence, and even change, how we engage in the issues of our time on this earth, I wonder what good religion is. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000357504
A person who can laugh and go with life does not demand to be in control, which is why the most controlling people may be sarcastic but lack an authentic sense of humor. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000358183
It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000360560
We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000360803
He just tells him to "descend" from his power position, "go away and get rid of all your possessions." Money is only the metaphor here; the real possession he has to get rid of is his ego. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000369282
Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000374593
Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often that's what we want - a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000389515
Words and ideas work in the short run to get you through school and to impress educators and employers. But they do not work in the long run or in the deep run. We soon find ourselves separate and without wonder. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000392722
In fact, that's largely what it means to be loving. You can hold for them what they cannot yet hold. You can transform for them what they cannot yet transform. You do that by not returning their negativity and fear in kind, as most people will do. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000394675
God created us for love, for union, for forgiveness and compassion and, yet, that has not been our storyline. That has not been our history. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000399449
Most of the Catholics Christians I've met would for all practical purposes believe Jesus is God only, and we are human only. We missed the big point. The point is the integration, both in Jesus and ourselves. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000409986
I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000421407
true biblical faith leaves you very vulnerable to reality, because now there is no place to hide. No wonder we prefer abstractions over the actual! We can hide behind abstractions, but Incarnation leaves you both utterly exposed and constantly invited. incorporation -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000421595
There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. There is no path toward love except by practicing love. War will always produce more war. Violence can never bring about true peace. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000422075
What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age. - CARL JUNG No wise person ever wanted to be younger. - NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000432382
When 'happiness' eludes us - as, eventually, it always will - we have the invitation to examine our programmed responses and to exercise our power to choose again. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000447533
But once we become practiced at a contemplative worldview, a "thisness" way of seeing, there is nothing trivial anymore and all is grace. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000448917
We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000452133
Every time you choose to love, you have also just chosen to die. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000459892
This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of "memory," not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000461027
Ancients knew that you need guidance, patronage and protection as you move from one place or state to another, whenever you cross a bridge. You had better know what you are doing when you leave one group or place to join another. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000467878
Your heart has to be prepared ahead of time through faith and prayer and grace and mercy and love and forgiveness so you can keep your heart open in hell, when hell happens. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000494566
You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000494714
One is struck in the study of saints, angels and gods by a pattern that seems quaint and harmless. Yet, it is so common that I know there must be a deeper meaning. There always seem to be guardians and spirits of doors, bridges, exits and entranceways. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000495425
Christianity is seen by more and more people as a negative message: anti gay, anti immigrant, anti abortion (as the only life issue), anti gay marriage, anti the Democratic party. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000512218
Christians affirm the communion of saints in the Nicene Creed, but I think there should be an equal belief in the "communion of sinners. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000514703
Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000531552
We Catholics must admit that there is a constant temptation among us to avoid the lectionary and the Word of God for private and pious devotions that usually have little power to actually change us or call our ego assumptions into question. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000535271
Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000547955
If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000547972
Don't expect or demand from groups what they usually cannot give. Doing so will make you needlessly angry and reactionary. They must and will be concerned with identity, boundaries, self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, and self-congratulation. This is their nature and purpose. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000553622
Solitude is a courageous encounter with our naked, most raw and real self, in the presence of pure love. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000568948
The hope is that science gives us objective truth; religion, however, gives us personal meaning or personal truth. They should not be seen as contraries. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000597445
Once you have met your own soul, you know that you are being guided. You are being led from within, and even the inexorable wheel of life is your teacher. It is the cycle of failure and renewal that slowly lowers you into the arms of a very safe God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000601351
Jesus is never upset at sinners; he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000601426
We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000609775
God is always drawing us closer, blow by blow and bit by bit. And most of the time we do not even know it is happening. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000613405
You cannot avoid sin or mistake anyway (Romans 5:12), but if you try too fervently, it often creates even worse problems. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000619953
If unconditional love, loyalty, and obedience are the tickets to an eternal life, then my black Labrador, Venus, will surely be there long before me, along with all the dear animals in nature who care for their young at great cost to themselves and have suffered so much at the hands of humans. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000628332
In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000630462
Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000630821
We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000634558
It is at the bottom where we find grace; for like water, grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools up. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000642061
Once you experience being loved when you are unworthy, being forgiven when you did something wrong, that moves you into non-dual thinking. You move from what I call meritocracy, quid pro quo thinking, to the huge ocean of grace, where you stop counting or calculating. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000642621
All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given - which is ourselves! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000646103
Jesus liberated us from religion. Jesus taught simple religious practices over major theorizing.... The only thoughts Jesus told us to police were our own: our own negative thoughts, our own violent thoughts, our own hateful thoughts-not other people's thoughts. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000648651
If you do not transform your wounds you will transmit them. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000653108
We looked too long for God and truth through words alone. The fruit for humanity has been rather limited, it seems to me - especially when I observe every day the extraordinary amount of unhappy and angry people in well educated and 'religious' countries. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000656430
The lie was that we believed that we believed all people were created equal! What made us think we were this great free society? Those at the top believed it then, and we at the top believe it two hundred years later. That's the power of myth. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000670718
God tries to first create a joyous yes inside of you, far more than any kind of no ... Just saying no is resentful dieting, whereas finding your deeper yes, and eating from that table, is always a spiritual banquet. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000677195
With the exception of Leviticus and Numbers, written by the priestly classes, most of the Bible is written by or about people who are occupied, enslaved, poor or disenfranchised in some way! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000685367
God's love is perfectly free. It is not coerced by any of our good actions, nor can we lose it because of our bad actions. We are stuck with it and cannot increase-or decrease-God's love for us by anything we do or don't do. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000688061
When you haven't found inner meaning, you will always substitute outer performance. It's the only way to fill that void, that sense of significance - that I am significant. So almost the degree of outer performance can, in many cases, mirror the lack of inner alignment. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000694985
The would-be maturing believer is not challenged to any adult faith or service to the world, much less mystical union. Everyone ends up in a muddled middle, where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as William Butler Yeats put it. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000706722
Whatever good, true, or perfect things we can say about humanity or creation, we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000717975
A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000725125
A paradox is a seeming contradiction, always demanding a change on the side of the observer. If we look at almost all things honestly we see everything has a character of paradox to it. Everything, including ourselves. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000728654
The Eucharist becomes a microcosmic moment of belief and power in which we say we believe in the real presence of God in Jesus, in this bread, and in this wine. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000729559
Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000735415
You surrender to love; you do not accomplish love by willpower. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000743095
If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000753331
The problem is solved. Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days. Not only is it "Always Advent," but every day can now be Christmas because the one we thought we were just waiting for has come once and for all. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000753915
Grace is found at the depths and in the death of everything. After these smaller deaths, we know that the only "deadly sin" is to swim on the surface of things, where we never see, find, or desire God and love. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000788542
What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change. It will think up a thousand other things to be concerned about or be moralistic about - anything rather than giving up "who I think I am" and "who I need to be to look good. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000793735
With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000808051
Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000808310
If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000809831
Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000812533
True baptism allows us to reframe, and contain, the reality of evil, without needing to blame anyone else, without any need for shame or vengeance. We are all in this together, and our common wound shows itself in different ways. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000817026
When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000822195
Much of the Christian religion has largely become "holding on" instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else). -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000824756
If you don't transform your suffering, you'll transmit it. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000826915
eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000833707
As to his gospel, Jesus Christ came into the world as the image of the invisible God to communicate to us that not only did we not need to be afraid of God, but that God is more for us than we are ourselves or one another. God's love is infinite, and unstoppable, and will win! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000835174
If people are to develop any deep spirituality today, and especially if men are to develop spiritually, they need to be liberated from self-serving worldviews. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000836337
To believe in Jesus, is to believe that the historic person who lived on this earth more than 2000 years ago was the image of the invisible God. That's a huge leap of faith, but it is my leap of faith, it's the act of faith of the Christian community. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000838266
Faith is the opposite of resentment, cynicism, and negativity. Faith is always, finally, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Faith actually begins to create what it desires. Faith always recreates the good world. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000858479
To quote Archimedes once again, you must have both "a lever and a place to stand" before you can move the world. The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand, with either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000886757
God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000907809
The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000911742
Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000915867
Creation is a process that is still happening and we're in on it! We are a part of this endless creativity of God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000917051
The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000918783
I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000919538
Organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000925327
If God is Trinity and Jesus is the face of God, then it is a benevolent universe. God is not someone to be afraid of, but is the Ground of Being and on our side. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000926280
The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000926443
Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000936188
Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000944180
Moralism is always the cheap substitute for mysticism. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000947358
Do not be shocked, but I suspect some priests' and ministers' moral failures are actually very helpful to their own "salvation" and necessary for their growing up. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000949725
Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000960254
The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000979923
What we know about God is important, but what we do with what we know about God is even more important. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000987195
A good teacher teaches people how to see, not what to see. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000987647
Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000988796
Pope Francis insists that mercy is at the very top of the Christian hierarchy of great truths, and everything falls apart whenever mercy is displaced by anything else. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000989986
Francis's all-night prayer, "Who are you, O God, and who am I?" is probably a perfect prayer, because it is the most honest prayer we can offer. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000991726
Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 000995014
You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001001228
Prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001003856
The same powerful Scripture text that brings a loving person to even greater love will be mangled and misused by a fearful or egocentric person. This is surely what Jesus means when he talks about the one who has being given more and those who have not losing what little they have. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001004925
When you don't need to play the victim or create victims you are FREE -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001012000
The true mystic is always both humble and compassionate, for she knows that she does not know. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001014040
Love is always stronger than death, and unto that love you have now returned. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001016060
The important thing is the willingness to give back the gift that is you, not the perfection of the gift itself. Can you feel the difference? -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001018918
Most women prefer circles of sharing to pyramids and hierarchies. They prefer conversation to construction. They will usually choose nurturance and empathy over competition and climbing. They will normally choose connection over simple performance games. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001018922
In my opinion, most organized religion does neither agentic service nor relational nurturance very well. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001022887
True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001039283
Life is not, nor ever has been, a straight line forward ... Life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001043076
Men and women are most alike at their most mature and soulful levels. Men and women are most different only at their most immature and merely physical levels. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001044057
We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001058976
Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001064445
Enlightenment is not about knowing as much as it is about unknowing; it is not so much learning as unlearning. It is about surrendering and letting go rather than achieving and possessing. It's more about entering the mystery than arriving at a mental certitude. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001070999
Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001080505
The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001086380
There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments-and it is we alone who desecrate them by our blindness and lack of reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001093223
Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001094401
The joyful acceptance of a limited world, of which I am only a small moment and limited part - this is probably the clearest indication of a man in his fullness. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001096183
Religion either produces the very best people or the very worst. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001100639
Death is not a changing of worlds as most imagine, as much as the walls of this world infinitely expanding. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001100691
There is no path to peace, but peace itself is the path. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001108293
Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it "conversion" or "repentance. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001115107
The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection - and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001119029
Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001123303
We are just a little tiny flicker of a much larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God's very self. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001123887
The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001133718
You do need some successes as a young person. They don't inflate the ego necessarily, they just give you identity and ego structure. But, don't construct your life around creating those. Or you will become narcissistic and ego-centric. That won't get you anywhere. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001142087
If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001155102
When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001163869
Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001167220
The game is over once we see clearly because evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary, or helpful. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001168638
Remember, the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001173315
Mature prayer always breaks into gratitude. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001173355
The spiritual world is hidden and perfectly revealed in the physical world. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001180803
Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001180804
People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001180806
In the first half of life, we fight the devil and have the illusion and inflation of "winning" now and then; in the second half of life, we always lose because we are invariably fighting God. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001180807
Pope John XXIII's motto might be heard here: "In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity." That is second-half-of-life, hardwon wisdom. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001180812
Once God and grace move us to the second half of life, religion becomes a mystical matter, rather than a moral matter. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001180814
In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us, and truly influence us. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001184718
Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001187563
One would think that people who insist on being monotheistic would be the first in line to walk across the artificial boundaries created by nation states, class systems, cultures and even religions. But often they are the last! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001201849
Faith is so rare-and religion so common-because no one wants to live between first base and second base. Faith is the in-between space where you're not sure you'll make it to second base. You've let go of one thing and haven't yet latched into another. Most of us choose the security of first base. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001205286
The ego knows itself by comparison. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001206790
God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001207760
There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand. For Jesus and for his followers, the crucifixion became the dramatic symbol of that necessary and absurd stumbling stone. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001210344
The very unfortunate result of this preoccupation with order, control, safety, pleasure, and certitude is that a high percentage of people never get to the contents of their own lives! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001210996
If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001217295
If your prayer is not enticing you outside your comfort zones, if your Christ is not an occasional "threat," you probably need to do some growing up and learning to love. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001219105
As English poet W.H. Auden put it in "Apropos of Many Things": "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001228618
You can unlock spiritual things only from within. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001232025
Having a school really is the fulfillment of a longtime dream of mine. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001249833
The journey never happens alone. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001255727
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001257900
Today we need whatever methods or help we can receive to allow the Christian message to take us to a deeper level of transformation. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001259535
To the degree you have experienced intimacy with God, you won't be afraid of death because you're experiencing the first tastes and promises of heaven in this world. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001260330
Religion was made to order to "save the world," to use a phrase Christians use so much, but we really haven't been doing a good job of it for centuries. It's heartbreaking really. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001262026
A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001264851
All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001264923
Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001265159
God does not change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001269860
Every viewpoint is a view from a point. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001270039
If we are created in the image and likeness of God, then whatever good, true, or beautiful things we can say about humanity or creation we can say of God exponentially. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001284012
I guess prophets are those who do not care whether you are ready to hear their message. They say it because it has to be said and because it is true. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001291113
Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful, and praising God until we ourselves are an act of praise. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001291445
In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001298658
We have been graced for a truly sweet surrender, if we can radically accept being radically accepted - for nothing! "Or grace would not be grace at all"! (Romans 11:6). -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001301011
When we can see the image of God where we don't want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001305431
The Crucified One is God's standing solidarity with the suffering, the tragedy, and the disaster of all time, and God's promise that it will not have the final word. The Risen One is God's final word about the universe and what God plans to do with all suffering. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001316718
Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001317497
Ordinary people in times of shame and doubt needed an anamchara, or a "soul friend." Soon -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001318424
Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001318729
We used to say that hearing 90 percent of confessions was like being stoned to death with marshmallows! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001325745
In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001328389
Perhaps the True Self
and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)
will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001335253
Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001341428
Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it - even before we change it. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001344116
Invariably when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed. So watch for any overreactions or overdenials. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001344123
I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001347956
Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001357201
I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001361238
God for us, God alongside us, God within us. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001361929
You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it toward it is, and then seeing the good as better. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001372309
Perfection, rather, is the ability to incorporate imperfection! There's no other way to live: You either incorporate imperfection, or you fall into denial. That's how the Spirit moves in or out of our lives. - from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001383281
You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001387355
Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001390284
Am I willing to walk into the wilds of my interior life without knowing what I'll find? -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001392447
Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001394352
The cross is the standing statement of what we do to one another and to ourselves. The resurrection is the standing statement of what God does to us in return. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001396589
Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001427621
As you look back on a year almost ended, recall the ways in which God has been inviting you to return, again and again, to Love which is the same as returning to God -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001436220
Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001436830
The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001438025
We need to encounter the hero within and let him lead us on the adventure of our lives. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001439408
Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things "work," but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001444286
Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001447315
In silence all our usual patterns assault us ... That is why most people give up rather quickly. When Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, the first things to show up were the wild beasts. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001460706
this preoccupation with order, control, -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001461892
People inside of belonging systems are very threatened by those who are not within that group. They are threatened by anyone who has found their citizenship in places they cannot control. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001465007
The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves - by themselves - and in themselves. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001471951
The concern was about getting the beginning right, and then life and eternity would take care of themselves. We have been preoccupied with getting the end right, for some reason. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001481811
Let's state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001483461
Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001485298
People who know who they are find it the easiest to know who they aren't. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001486481
Religion is best when it points beyond itself, like Isaiah or John the Baptist. It is worst when it gives you just enough of the forms to inoculate you against the substance, when it substitutes rituals for reality, the container for the contents, the wineskins for the ecstatic wine. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001491530
I think most human beings are dualistic thinkers. It gets them through the day. It gives them a sense of superiority and security - that's what the ego wants. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001492379
The people who know God well - mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God - always meet a lover, not a dictator. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001502041
Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001511258
When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001514353
Contemplation is an alternative consciousness that refuses to identify with or feed what are only passing shows. It is the absolute opposite of addiction, consumerism or any egoic consciousness. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001516295
People who have been initiated "broke through in what felt like breaking down". -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001520122
Worship of Jesus is rather harmless and risk-free; actually following Jesus changes everything. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001528291
Someone has to make clear to us that homes are not meant to be lived in - but only to be moved out from. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001530400
True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001540270
Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001557484
If you depend on being emotionally inspired or newly motivated, you will need a new fix almost every day. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001571550
"Christ" is bigger than the Earth planet. If tomorrow we discover life on another planet, the whole "Jesus" piece would not make sense anymore. If he did everything for just us on this planet he wouldn't be the savior of the "world." -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001575346
I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001581757
If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001586013
Advent is not about a sentimental waiting for the Baby Jesus, -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001586244
The two Virtues of Equanimity and Compassion become more available to the person whose ego-shell has been smashed-either by great suffering or by great love-or by both. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001587295
life seems to be a collision of opposites. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001597294
Wisely put it years ago, " Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name."1 -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001607778
New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001609494
It's important to note that Jesus and Christ are two different faith affirmations. Hardly any Christians have been taught that - they think "Christ" is Jesus's last name. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001613946
If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001614831
There are two ways of being a prophet. One is to tell the enslaved that they can be free. It is the difficult path of Moses. The second is to tell those who think they are free that they are in fact enslaved. This is the even more difficult path of Jesus. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001623725
Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001633924
The eyes with which you will look back at God will be the same eyes with which God first looked at you. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001639805
To pray is to build your own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else is within your house. To pray is to recognize that it is not your house at all. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001640936
Thomas Merton, say it, as he so often does: A door opens in the center of our being, and we seem to fall through it into immense depths, which although they are infinite - are still accessible to us. All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001641442
I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001642247
Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001646790
We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001646791
We moved from wondering to answering, which has not served us well at all. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001646792
The more one gives one's self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one's self. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001646793
When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001646794
How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001646795
Pain that is not transformed is transmitted. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001646796
most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001646797
Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001646798
It is only through the holes in our soul that we break out and God breaks through. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001646799
This realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001661478
Silence is the necessary space around things that allows them to develop and flourish without my pushing. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001680488
The True Self always has something good to say. The False Self babbles on, largely about itself. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001685145
Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001695862
If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001697906
I finally had to be either Roman or catholic, and I continue to choose the catholic end of that spectrum. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001699427
Men must learn how to grieve, or they are inevitably angry or controlling, and they don't even know why. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001705129
The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001705944
You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001710009
It is so important to balance orthodoxy with orthopraxy. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001712524
Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001716626
God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001721167
I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort - every day - is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001725956
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001741562
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001744230
We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001746114
Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them - all the way through! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001748626
Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have - right now. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001750260
Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001750400
The greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001756050
Religious energy is in the dark questions, seldom in the answers. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001766664
The gift of darkness draws you to know God's presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001769134
There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it's enough. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001778030
Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001786241
Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path to our own inner authority. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001803932
God oft-times doesn't give a lot of answers but just keeps telling us who we are. God just keeps inviting us into that place where love is alive and where God is in love. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001819049
Faith is not a means to something further. It is not something we do in order to get to heaven. Faith is its own end. To have faith is already to have come alive. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001820305
If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001820558
The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001824428
You cannot heal what you cannot acknowledge. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001825157
No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001836571
We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001847803
Only hour by hour gratitude is strong enough to overcome all temptations to resentment. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001850116
God comes to us disguised as our life. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001850458
Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001853835
Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001853941
The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001854815
I see little difference in the attitudes of those who consider themselves Christian and those who are openly secular and agnostic. Most Christian citizenship appears to be clearly right here - on this little bit of very unreal estate. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001861537
In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001863065
A person must pass the lessons learned on to others - or there has been no real gift at all. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001865304
One has to wonder, do we really want people to grow, or do we just want to be in control of the moment? -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001869414
Mutual perfect faith would be heaven! -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001869741
Yes, the natural world is the first and primary Bible. We have not honored it, so how could we, or would we, know how to honor and properly use the second Bible, when it was written. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001879766
Men as a class appear to be "at risk," maybe even at high risk. -- Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes : pic 001879949
I am who I am in the eyes of God- br> nothing more and nothing less. -- Richard Rohr