Richard Rohr Quotes

I think it's important to remember that by the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes, and no longer just in parts.

Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate.

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.

I'm not trying to make political statements ,but theological statements. How can religion get itself so identified with one political party, exclusionary world views, or with "pelvic morality" as the defining issues of the Gospel? Jesus surely didn't. Jesus said to "preach the gospel to all nations", which means we do not just talk to ourselves.

Creation is a process that is still happening and we’re in on it! We are a part of this endless creativity of God.

When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.

There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it's enough.

Either you allow Holy Scriptures to change you, or you will normally try to use it to change--and clobber--other people. It is the height of idolatry to use the supposed Word of God so that my small self can be in control and be right. But I am afraid this has been more the norm than the exception in the use of the Bible.

You cannot be naïve about evil. You cannot be naïve to the reality that there are human beings and human situations which have totally identified with the dark side of reality. They are malicious. Realism teaches you to put up appropriate boundaries so that people can't do any more evil than possible. But that doesn't mean you do evil back to them.

If you depend on being emotionally inspired or newly motivated, you will need a new fix almost every day.

All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect. That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody . . .

Jesus is never upset at sinners; he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners.

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.

Modern culture is in so much trouble, where people don't have a deep inner life, or any deep experience of their true self in God, who they were before anyone said anything about them, before they received their first medal or ego identification. That`s why suffering is so important, because suffering is when those little rewards are taken away from you.

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.

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.

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.

It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody.

The ego hates losing – even to God.

Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.

Every time you choose to love, you have also just chosen to die.

People who think they can just do a non-stop flight to mystical, non-dual thinking, to get it out without going through the process, are usually not right. That's airy-fairy thinking. They have to wait until they are hurt themselves, or they are cheated, or lied to or betrayed, and they will see that their non-dual thinking is not tested, or truly a gift of the spirit. It's simply fuzzy thinking.

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.

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.

Today we need whatever methods or help we can receive to allow the Christian message to take us to a deeper level of transformation.

Transformed people transform people.

The real spiritual journey is work. You can make a naïve assertion that you trust in Jesus, but until it is tested a good, oh, 200 times, I doubt very much that it's true.

I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.

If you do not transform your wounds you will transmit them.

You surrender to love; you do not accomplish love by willpower.

We grow up as natural optimists as Americans. Catholic priests were so hopeful as we watched the Vatican II experience. Yet, it's a punch in the belly to see what has happened in the church and the world. Dualistic thinking seems to have taken over the church and our politics to a really neurotic degree.

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.

Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.

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.

We don't have much wisdom about the second half when things really open up and end up looking a lot more progressive. In my own Catholic church, for example, we're sort of circling the wagons today by thinking that more moral strictures, more exclusionary rules on this or that, that that's going to do for the first half of life. I don't think it really does.

The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.

You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and a willingness to not know-and not even need to know. This ever widens and deepens your perspective. This is how you allow and encounter Mystery and move into the contemplative zone.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

It is only through the holes in our soul that we break out and God breaks through.

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).

I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.

You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality.

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

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.

The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.

When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself.

If you stay in the mainstream of life, in other words, 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. 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. In other words, you hold onto your values, but you do it much more inclusively, humbly and in an open ended way. Suffering takes you there.

The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God, not by doing it right, but by doing it wrong.