Richard Rohr Quotes
You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality.
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.
It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody.
I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.
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.
Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.
Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.
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.
When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.
It seems we are suffering from a very narrow and self serving reading of the Gospel right now.
Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my opinion, most organized religion does neither agentic service nor relational nurturance very well.
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.
Many people I know who are doing truly helpful and healing ministry find their primary support from a couple of enlightened friends, and only secondarily, if at all, from the larger organizations.
I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so.
Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.
What we know about God is important, but what we do with what we know about God is even more important.
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.
Jesus praised faith and trust – even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall, or to fail, and not to fall apart.
Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.
God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.
We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.
Silence is the necessary space around things that allows them to develop and flourish without my pushing.
If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.
Today we need whatever methods or help we can receive to allow the Christian message to take us to a deeper level of transformation.
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.
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.
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.
If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach.
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.
People wanted to me to describe more about what I call "the container," and then describe what the second half of life feels like.
Life is all about practicing for heaven." p 101.
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.
You can unlock spiritual things only from within.