Richard Rohr Quotes:

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

Topics: Who I Am, Enough, Protect, Franciscans

The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine - that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they're talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.

Topics: Talking, Goal, Empathy, Recurring Themes

The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.

Topics: People, Risk, Lovers

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.

Topics: Spiritual, Jesus, Real, Assertion

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

source: - Richard Rohr (2011). “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life”, p.201, John Wiley & Sons

Topics: Thinking, Way, New Ways Of Thinking

Our culture is almost entirely prepared to not just help you create your false self, but to get very identified with it and attached to it. So, without some form of God experience, which teaches you who you are apart from that - we would say in the religious world, who you are "in" God, in the mind and heart of God - there's almost no way to get out of it.

Topics: Religious, Heart, Self

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.

Topics: Moving, Fall, Drawing

Religion has in fact outdone culture in dualistic thinking - we've become as violent, as hateful toward our enemies, damning them to hell and whatever else, that the world doesn't look to us for wisdom, because we're trapped in the dualistic mind, instead of the mind of Christ that we were supposed to have.

Topics: Thinking, Mind, Enemy

The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.

Topics: Happiness, Responsibility, Journey

Everything has to be understood in opposition to something else. For some dang reason, the ego prefers to make one side better than the other, so we choose. And we decide males are better than females, America is better than Canada, Democrats are better than Republicans. And for most people, once this decision is made, it is amazing the amount of blindness they become capable of. They really don't see what's right in front of them. Once you see this, it's an amazing breakthrough, and that is the starting place for moving away from dualistic thinking.

Topics: Moving, Thinking, America, Moving Away

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.

Topics: Jesus, Faces, Sides

We cannot avoid the globalization of knowledge and information. When I was a boy growing up in Kansas, I could never think about a Buddhist, or a Hindu, or Muslim, or even a Protestant - I grew up in such a Catholic ghetto. That's not possible anymore, unless you live in a cave or something. So either we have knowledge of what the other religions and other denominations are saying, and how they tie into the common thread, or we end up just being dangerously ignorant of other people and therefore prejudiced.

Topics: Buddhist, Growing Up, Ghetto, Knowledge And Information, Denominations

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.

Topics: Self, People, Trying

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.

Topics: Ocean, Moving, Thinking, Meritocracy, Quid Pro Quo

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.

Topics: Fighting, Mirrors, Self, Mirror Image

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.

Topics: Spiritual, Teacher, Prayer, Spiritual Teachers, Journaling

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.

Topics: Return, Doe, Resurrection

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.

Topics: Christian, Jesus, Thinking, Different Faiths

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.

Topics: Prayer, Heart, Grace, Grace And Mercy, Love And Forgiveness

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.

Topics: Christian, Jesus, Believe, Christian Community

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.

Topics: Too Much, Waste, Bigger

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.

Topics: Hurt, Thinking, People, Gifts Of The Spirit, Non Stop

Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.

Topics: Moon, Fingers, Should

When you don't need to play the victim or create victims you are FREE

Topics: Play, Needs, Victim

Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world.

source: - Richard Rohr (1996). “Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections”, p.177, Gracewing Publishing

Topics: Maturity, World, Imperfect, A Perfect World, Imperfect World

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.

Topics: Knowing, Abuse, Transition

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.

Topics: Years, Suffering, World, Blocked

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.

Topics: Christian, Spiritual, Country

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

Topics: Firsts, Half, Wells, Christian Denominations, Good Sense

It is at the bottom where we find grace; for like water, grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools up.

Topics: Water, Grace, Pool

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.

Topics: Christian, Jobs, Order

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.

Topics: Religious, Jesus, Imperfection

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.

Topics: Taken, Self, People, Modern Culture

A good teacher teaches people how to see, not what to see.

source: - "Richard Rohr: Learning To See (VIDEO)". Interview with Travis Reed, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 26, 2012.

Topics: Teacher, People, Good Teacher

The school of relationships is where you learn self-knowledge. I just don't know how you could learn it sitting alone in the desert on a rock by yourself. You have to see where you fail at it. And that confrontation with your own ability - "I was again not able to love" - those are the teachable moments.

Topics: School, Self, Rocks, Teachable, Teachable Moments

Transformed people transform people.

Topics: Wisdom, People

Your false self is always that which is passing away. Your true self doesn't go up or down, it's constant - it's a rock. Once you learn how to live there, what others say about you, your failures or successes - these don't send you on a roller coaster ride down or up. It's really the only way to peace. There's no other way to be peaceful except in the true self.

Topics: Self, Rocks, Peaceful, Roller Coaster Rides

Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.

Topics: Pain

"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."

Topics: Jesus, Pieces, World

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.

Topics: Order, Perfect, Lines, Straight Lines

I think it's almost necessary for most people to have the freedom to pull back, and then re-enter at an adult level, where they are neither playing the victim nor creating victims, but just participating in calm, adult behavior. Because an awful lot of churches just aren't there at adult Christianity, this seems to be the norm anymore.

Topics: Thinking, Creating, People

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

Topics: Names, Creating, Special, Friars, Uncovering

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.

Topics: Creating, Giving, Ego

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.

Topics: Fall, Past, Ego

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.

Topics: Growing Up, Taken, Thinking, Vatican Ii

The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique.

Topics: Love, Spiritual, Loneliness, Spiritual Disciplines, Light And Love

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.

Topics: Thinking, Giving, Ego

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.

Topics: Love You, Ifs And, Empowering

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God

Topics: Jesus, Humanity, Mind

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!

Topics: Jesus, Winning, Love Is

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

Topics: Jesus, Thinking, People

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.

Topics: Mean, Dark, Reality

The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.

Topics: Morning, Light, Sunflower, Morning Glory

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.

Topics: Love, Eye, Want, God Image

Every viewpoint is a view from a point.

Topics: Views, Viewpoints

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.

Topics: Broken, People, Trying

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.

Topics: Compassion, Unions, Storyline

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

Topics: Common, One Liner

Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often thatÂ’s what we want - a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems.

Topics: Respect, Military, Political

...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

Topics: People, Produce, Worst

Most Christian 'believers' tend to echo the cultural prejudices and worldviews of the dominant group in their country, with only a minority revealing any real transformation of attitudes or consciousness. It has been true of slavery and racism, classism and consumerism and issues of immigration and health care for the poor.

Topics: Christian, Country, Attitude, Classism

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

Topics: Teaching, Years, Lasts

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.

Topics: Jesus, Plato, Dust

One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing and action.

Topics: Spiritual, Leader, Political, Political Leaders

I have committed myself to joy. I have come to realize that those who make space for joy, those who prefer nothing to joy, those who desire the utter reality, will most assuredly have it. We must not be afraid to announce it to refugees, slum dwellers, saddened prisoners, angry prophets. Now and then we must even announce it to ourselves. In this prison of now, in this cynical and sophisticated age, someone must believe in joy.

Topics: Believe, Reality, Space, Dwellers

I am who I am in the eyes of God- nothing more and nothing less.

Topics: Eye, Who I Am, I Am Who I Am

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.

Topics: Spiritual, Jesus, Powerful, Loving Person, Greater Love

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.

Topics: People, Firsts, Break

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.

Topics: Kindness, Heart, Thinking

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

Topics: Needs, Inspired, Motivated

Jesus liberated us from religion. Jesus taught simple religious practices over major theorizing.Â… 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.

Topics: Religious, Jesus, Simple, Religious Practices

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.

Topics: Issues, Earth, Our Love

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.

Topics: Meditation, Forgiving, Want, God Forgives, Franciscans

You come to God not by being strong, but by being weak; not by being right, but through your mistakes.

Topics: Strong, Mistake, Weak

If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.

What some now call 'emerging Christianity' or 'the emerging church' is not something you join, establish, or invent. You just name it and then you see it everywhere- already in place! Such nongroup groups, the 'two or three' gathered in deep truth, create a whole new level of affiliation, dialogue, and friendship...

Topics: Names, Two, Church, Affiliation

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

Topics: Pain, Transmit

Christianity is a lifestyle - a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established "religion" (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history, and still believe that Jesus is one's "personal Lord and Savior" . . . The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.

Topics: Christian, Jesus, Selfish, Lifestyle Change

The journey never happens alone.

Topics: Journey

God comes to you disguised as your life,

To give, and not demand that others receive . . . that is the crossover point to maturity. . .

Topics: Maturity, Giving, Demand, Crossover

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.

Topics: Opposites, Addiction, Alternatives

there is no path to peace, but peace itself is the path.

Topics: Path

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.

Topics: Mean, Order, Heaven

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.

Topics: Prayer, Eye, Judging, Labeling

Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.

source: - "Nature and the Soul" by Richard Rohr, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 7, 2011.

Topics: Song, Singing, Praise

In terms of the ego, most religions teach in some way that all of us must die before we die, and then we will not be afraid of dying. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as whenever you are not in control.

Topics: Strong, Ignorance, Ego

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody.

Topics: People, Splits, Wholeness

Solitude is a courageous encounter with our naked, most raw and real self, in the presence of pure love.

Topics: Real, Self, Solitude

Prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us.

Topics: Letting Go, Prayer, Willing

Men must learn how to grieve, or they are inevitably angry or controlling, and they don't even know why.

Topics: Grieving, Men, Angry

When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.

Topics: Kings, Kingdoms, Chance

It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.

Topics: Fall, Learning, Matter

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.

Topics: Gratitude, Prayer, Grateful, Praise God

Worship of Jesus is rather harmless and risk-free; actually following Jesus changes everything.

Topics: Jesus, Risk, Worship

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.

Topics: Blow, Drawing

A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.

Topics: People, Helping

In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us.

Topics: Pain, Grieving, Soul, Soul Work

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.

Topics: Perfect, Becoming, Salvation, Transactions

The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

Topics: Fire, World, Next, Insurance Policy, Fire Insurance

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.

Topics: Levels, Satisfaction, Patient

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

Topics: Practice, Criticism

THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky -journey. It's a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty or failure. On this journey the man learns to trust God more than he trusts a sense of right and wrong or his own sense of self-worth.

Topics: Adventure, Journey, Men

Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through!

Topics: Overcoming, Way, Obstacles

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

Topics: Honest, Mystery, Language

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

Topics: Jobs, Admiration, Conscious

In my opinion, most organized religion does neither agentic service nor relational nurturance very well.

Topics: Doe, Opinion, Wells

Notice that whenever we suffer pain, the mind is always quick to identify with the negative aspects of things and replay them over and over again, wounding us deeply. Almost all humans have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) of the mind, which is why so many people become fearful, hate-filled, and wrapped around their negative commentaries. This pattern must be recognized early and definitively. Peace of mind is actually an oxymoron. When you're in your mind, you're hardly ever at peace, and when you're at peace, you're never only in your mind.

Topics: Pain, Hate, People, Obsessive Compulsive, Ocd

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.

Topics: Faith, Letting Go, Space

If you don't transform your suffering, you'll transmit it.

Topics: Suffering, Transmit

Spirituality is about being ready. All the spiritual disciplines of your life - prayer, study, meditation or ritual, religious vows - are there so you can break through to the eternal. Spirituality is about awakening the eyes, the ears, the heart so you can see what's always happening right in front of you.

Topics: Spiritual, Religious, Prayer, Spiritual Disciplines

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.

Topics: Running, Hurt, Pain

Advent is not about a sentimental waiting for the Baby Jesus,

Topics: Baby, Jesus, Waiting, Baby Jesus

Moralism is always the cheap substitute for mysticism.

Topics: Substitutes, Moralism, Mysticism

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.

Topics: Men, Immature, Levels, Mature And Immature, Soulful

I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so.

Topics: Religious, Believe, Thinking, Multiplicity

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.

Topics: Spiritual, Self, Phrases, World Religions

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.

Topics: Christian, Fall, Hierarchy, Everything Falls Apart

Having a school really is the fulfillment of a longtime dream of mine.

Topics: Dream, School, Fulfillment

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.

Topics: Angel, Doors, Bridges, Deeper Meaning

The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.

Topics: Gratitude, Half, Unions

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.

Topics: Eye, Cynical, Negative, Opening Your Eyes

The more one gives one's self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one's self.

Topics: Self, Giving, Creative

Remember finally, that the ashes that were on your forehead are created from the burnt palms of last Palm Sunday. New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.

Topics: New Beginnings, Sunday, Lasts, Palm Sunday

We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.

Topics: Soul, Grows

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.

Topics: Pain, Emotional, Spirituality, Emotional Baggage, Great Spiritual

If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is self-abasement; fortitude without love is recklessness; generosity without love is extravagance; care without love is mere duty; fidelity without love is servitude. Every virtue is an expression of love. No virtue is really a virtue unless it is permeated, or informed, by love.

Topics: Love, Christian, Heart, Expressions Of Love, Religious Love

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 . . .

Topics: Letting Go, Children, People

Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God.

God comes to us disguised as our life.

source: - Richard Rohr (2016). “Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps”, p.15, SPCK

Topics: Our Lives

There are three things we have to let go of. The first is the compulsion to be successful. Second, is the compulsion to be right-especially theologically right. (That's merely an ego trip, and because of this "need" churches split in half, with both parties prisoners of their own egos.) Finally, there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control.

Topics: Letting Go, Powerful, Party, Ego Trip

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.

Topics: Compassion, Two, Great Love

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.'

Topics: Inspiring, Disappointment, Growth

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.

Topics: Mirrors, Way, Void

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.

Topics: Spiritual, People, Mind, Spiritual Experience

The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

Topics: Reality, Bears, Courageous

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

Topics: Teacher, Ideas, Darkness, Relapse, Woundedness

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.

source: - Richard Rohr (2011). “AARP Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life”, p.77, John Wiley & Sons

Topics: Real, Sacrifice, Forever

You cannot heal what you cannot acknowledge.

Topics: Heal, Acknowledge

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.

source: - Source: ryanthomasneace.com

Topics: Mean, Dark, Reality, Malicious

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

Topics: Creativity, Creation, Process

The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.

Topics: People, Risk, Lovers

The fears that assault us are mostly simple anxieties about social skills, about intimacy, about likeableness, or about performance. We need not give emotional food or charge to these fears or become attached to them. We don’t even have to shame ourselves for having these fears. Simply ask your fears, “What are you trying to teach me?” Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for “False Evidence Appearing Real.” From Everything Belongs, p. 143

Topics: Real, Simple, Emotional, Social Skills, Acronyms

When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves

Topics: Care, Take Care, Should, Should I

The ego knows itself by comparison.

Topics: Ego, Knows, Comparison

The people who know God well - the mystics, the hermits, those who risk everything to find God - always meet a lover, not a dictator. God is never found to be an abusive father or a tyrannical mother, but always a lover who is more than we dared hope for. How different than the "account manager" that most people seem to worship. God is a lover who receives and forgives everything.

Topics: Mother, Father, People, Abusive Father

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).

Topics: Christian, Letting Go, Doe

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.

source: - Richard Rohr (2013). “Immortal Diamond: The search for our true self”, p.124, SPCK

Topics: Loyalty, Unconditional Love, Animal, Loyalty Love, Labradors

The Gospel gives human suffering deep, personal, and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by connecting us to the very "pain of God".

source: - "A Lever and a Place to Stand: The Contemplative Stance, the Active Prayer". Book by Richard Rohr, 2011.

Topics: Pain, Giving, Suffering

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

Topics: Years, Looks, Way

Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.

source: - Richard Rohr (2013). “Immortal Diamond: The search for our true self”, p.35, SPCK

Topics: Religious, Jesus, Nice, Payoff, Pharisees

My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.

Topics: Religious, Mean, Dark

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

Topics: Break Through, Soul, Break Out

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.

Topics: Strong, Moving, Perspective

It seems we are suffering from a very narrow and self serving reading of the Gospel right now.

source: - Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

Topics: Reading, Self, Suffering

Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.

Topics: Jobs, Delight, Consciousness

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.

Topics: Biblical, Ideas, Achievement

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

Topics: Solitude, Demand, Able

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

Topics: Love You, Willpower, Surrender, Surrender To Love

If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.

source: - Richard Rohr (2014). “A Lever and a Place to Stand: The Contemplative Stance, the Active Prayer”, p.103, Paulist Press

Topics: Pain, Ifs, Transmit

There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.

Topics: Mistake, Dancing, Making Mistakes

People will often, almost always, prefer a male God. A male image of God gives them this sense of security, safety, order, no nonsense. So that's where their psyche is at. Probably it's something that they've got to go through. Not that there isn't a need for order in the world, but the mystical level seems to be the mature level of religion, and there the question is not order but union - divine union. And so, without some integration of the feminine, usually you never get to the mystical level.

Topics: Order, People, Safety, No Nonsense

The spiritual world is hidden and perfectly revealed in the physical world.

Topics: Spiritual, World

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.

Topics: Differences, Issues, Midlife

The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.

Topics: Imagination, Darkness, Feelings, Sensory

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.

Topics: Sacred, Moments, Blindness

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

source: - Richard Rohr (2013). “Immortal Diamond: The search for our true self”, p.56, SPCK

Topics: Love You, Chosen, Dies

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

Topics: Surprise, Merciful

Because I am a part of the Big Picture, I do matter and substantially so. Because I am only a part, however, I am rightly situated off to stage right—and happily so. What freedom there is in such truth! We are inherently important and included, yet not burdened with manufacturing or sustaining that private importance. Our dignity is given by God, and we are freed from ourselves!

Topics: Important, Matter, Dignity, Big Picture

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.

Topics: Self, Flames, Littles, Flicker, Self Consciousness

There has to be a womp on the side of the head that defeats and undercuts this game of performance. It has to fall apart. Now unfortunately, that very often does not happen until what I call the second half of life, when there's been enough death in the family and you start experiencing your own physical deterioration.

Topics: Fall, Games, Sides

The greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order.

Topics: Order, Perfection, Joy

The true mystic is always both humble and compassionate, for she knows that she does not know.

source: - "Mysticism In Religion: Three Ways to View the Sunset" by Richard Rohr, www.huffingtonpost.com. Febriary 11, 2011.

Topics: Humble, Doe, Compassionate

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?

Topics: Differences, Giving, Perfection

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

source: - Richard Rohr (2011). “AARP Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life”, p.73, John Wiley & Sons

Topics: Humanity, Joining, Failing

God, give me a good humiliation every day. It's good for the soul and it's good for the ego.

source: - Source: www.psychologytoday.com

Topics: Giving, Soul, Ego

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.

source: - Richard Rohr (2010). “On the Threshold of Transformation”, p.197, Loyola Press

Topics: Sarcastic, People, Laughing

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.

source: - Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

Topics: Thinking, Important, Half

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.

Topics: Jesus, Giving Up, People

Nature religions, for example, speak of summer, fall, winter, and spring. They see the downward path as the necessary prelude to any kind of upward path again. Our vocabulary is different. We Christians speak of the death and resurrection of Jesus. But unfortunately, we've projected it all onto Jesus and it didn't become a life agenda for the rest of us.

source: - Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

Topics: Summer, Christian, Jesus

Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.

source: - Richard Rohr (2004). “Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation”, Crossroad Publishing Company

Topics: Pain, Suffering, Pain And Suffering

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.

source: - Richard Rohr, Andreas Ebert (2001). “The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective”, Crossroad Publishing Company

Topics: Real, Self, Ego, New Self

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.

source: - Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

Topics: Jesus, Party, Mean, World View

Love is luring us forward...to the fullness of our own being

Topics: Love Is, Fullness

Mature prayer always breaks into gratitude.

Topics: Gratitude, Prayer, Mature

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

Topics: Ifs, Transmit, Wounds

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

Topics: Reality, Purpose, Response

What we know about God is important, but what we do with what we know about God is even more important.

source: - "Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer". Book by Richard Rohr, 1999.

Topics: Important, Knows

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.

source: - "Gender, God and Spirituality" by Richard Rohr, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 28, 2012.

Topics: Simple, Climbing, Games

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.

Topics: Rivers, Doe, Needs

Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.

Topics: People, Leader, Immature

Once God and grace move us to the second half of life, religion becomes a mystical matter, rather than a moral matter.

Topics: Moving, Grace, Half

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.

source: - Richard Rohr (2013). “Immortal Diamond: The search for our true self”, p.126, SPCK

Topics: Spiritual, Trying, Saying No, Banquets, Resentful

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.

Topics: Heaven, Promise, Degrees

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.

source: - Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

Topics: Party, Gay, Issues, Anti Abortion, Anti Gay

Sacramental listening reminds us that current suffering isn't the end of the story. God loves us deeply, and the vision for the future is vaster and more magnificent than we could ever imagine. In these moments of profound human presence, we are awakened to the divine presence and see that the kingdom of God is coming and yet is already here.

Topics: Profound, Listening, Suffering, God Loves Us

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

source: - Richard Rohr, Andreas Ebert (2001). “The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective”, Crossroad Publishing Company

Topics: Firsts, Different, Common

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.

source: - Interview with Judy Valente, www.pbs.org. November 11, 2011.

Topics: Spiritual, Disappointment, Thinking, Lutherans

After 32 years as a priest , I think its fair to say that most institutional churches are very limited in addressing higher levels of spiritual consciousness.

source: - Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

Topics: Spiritual, Thinking, Years

The ego hates losing – even to God.

source: - Richard Rohr (2011). “AARP Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life”, p.63, John Wiley & Sons

Topics: Hate, Ego, Losing