Welcome to our collection of quotes by Richard Rohr. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr, (born 1943) is an American Franciscan priest and writer on spirituality based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was ordained to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church in 1970. PBS has called him "one of the most popular spirituality authors and speakers in the world".
Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.
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.
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.
The people who know God well mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God always meet a lover, not a dictator.
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.
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.
Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.
Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.
Contemplation is a spiritual practice that has the potential to heal, and connect us to the source of our being.
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.
When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself.
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.
In the end, we do not so much reclaim what we have lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan and find it insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream.
It is at the bottom where we find grace; for like water, grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools up.
The greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order.
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.
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.
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.
I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so.
Silence is the necessary space around things that allows them to develop and flourish without my pushing.
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.
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.
A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.
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.
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.
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.
Jesus praised faith and trust -- even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall, or to fail, and not to fall apart.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.
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.
If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach.
When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves.
Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.
Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate.
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.
Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is only through the holes in our soul that we break out and God breaks through.
The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved.
It's the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don't feel the need to eliminate anybody.
People wanted to me to describe more about what I call the container, and then describe what the second half of life feels like.
When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting...you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic.
The message of falling -- failure, death, crucifixion, whatever you want to say -- is not really that. Some sort of falling is really found in all the world's religions, just in different languages.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The gift of darkness draws you to know God's presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
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.
All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.
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.
When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.
The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.
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.
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.
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.
When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself. Most of our mainline Christian denominations, in my opinion, don't do the first or second halves very well. We don't really give people a good container, we give them a bunch of legalisms.
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.
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
The most common one-liner in the Bible is, Do not be afraid. Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.
Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.
You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality.
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.