Top 100 Richard Rohr Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Once God and grace move us to the second half of life, religion becomes a mystical matter, rather than a moral matter.
Richard Rohr
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Every time you choose to love, you have also just chosen to die.
Richard Rohr
#10. Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.
Richard Rohr
#11. 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
#12. Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.
Richard Rohr
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. The more one gives one's self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one's self.
Richard Rohr
#16. Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.
Richard Rohr
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.
Richard Rohr
#20. 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
#21. Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.
Richard Rohr
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Love is luring us forward ... to the fullness of our own being
Richard Rohr
#26. Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.
Richard Rohr
#27. We do not handle suffering. Suffering handles us.
Richard Rohr
#28. How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe.
Richard Rohr
#29. Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.
Richard Rohr
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over.
Richard Rohr
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
Richard Rohr
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Ordinary people in times of shame and doubt needed an anamchara, or a "soul friend." Soon
Richard Rohr
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.
Richard Rohr
#43. One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing and action.
Richard Rohr
#44. Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them - all the way through!
Richard Rohr
#45. There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it's enough.
Richard Rohr
#46. 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
#47. We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness.
Richard Rohr
#48. 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
#49. Men must learn how to grieve, or they are inevitably angry or controlling, and they don't even know why.
Richard Rohr
#50. 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
#51. When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.
Richard Rohr
#52. You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus.
Richard Rohr
#53. There is no path to peace, but peace itself is the path.
Richard Rohr
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. There is no straight line to Goodness, to Love, or to God. And thank God, Grace is always retroactive.
Richard Rohr
#59. 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
#61. 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
#62. People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.
Richard Rohr
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.
Richard Rohr
#72. 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
#73. It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude!
Richard Rohr
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.
Richard Rohr
#80. The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.
Richard Rohr
#81. 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
#82. Moralism is always the cheap substitute for mysticism.
Richard Rohr
#83. 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
#84. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
Richard Rohr
#85. 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
#86. We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.
Richard Rohr
#87. New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.
Richard Rohr
#88. Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.
Richard Rohr
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.
Richard Rohr
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives.
Richard Rohr
#95. Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God.
Richard Rohr
#96. Silence is the necessary space around things that allows them to develop and flourish without my pushing.
Richard Rohr
#97. We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.
Richard Rohr
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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