Top 40 Ronald Rolheiser Quotes
#1. Grace, not willpower, is what ultimately empowers us to live loving lives. Creativity, both in what spawns within the artist and the artifact, can be a vital source of that grace.
Ronald Rolheiser
#2. When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated, or enraged, it is in fact because our outside experience is so different from what we already hold dear inside.
Ronald Rolheiser
#3. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.
Ronald Rolheiser
#4. Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair.
Ronald Rolheiser
#6. Loneliness is not, therefore, a quality inhering in an otherwise complete person. Rather it is so essential to our makeup that, viewed from a certain perspective, it can be seen to be the very constitutive element of our personality.17
Ronald Rolheiser
#7. There can be no final solution to our loneliness in this life.
Ronald Rolheiser
#8. All of us experience, to a greater or lesser extent, a loneliness that results from not having enough anchors, enough absolutes, and enough permanent roots to make us feel secure and stable in a world characterized by transience.
Ronald Rolheiser
#9. We get ready for death by beginning to live life as we should have been living it all along.
Ronald Rolheiser
#10. If listened to correctly, loneliness keeps telling us the purpose for which God made us.
Ronald Rolheiser
#11. Being lonely does not mean that we are abnormal, love-starved, oversexed, or alienated. Perhaps all it means is that we are incurably human and sensitive to the fact that God made us for an ecstatic togetherness in a body with divine love and with all other persons of sincere will.
Ronald Rolheiser
#12. Ultimately abortion takes place because there is something wrong within the culture, within the system, and not simply because this or that particular woman is seeking to end an unwanted pregnancy.
Ronald Rolheiser
#13. Above all, such an understanding of loneliness should help liberate us. It should teach us that loneliness is both a good and a natural force in our lives.
Ronald Rolheiser
#15. before being born, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always, in some dark way, remembering that kiss and measuring everything it experiences in relation to that original sweetness.
Ronald Rolheiser
#16. Loneliness is God's imprint in us, constantly telling us where we should be going.
Ronald Rolheiser
#17. Becoming like Jesus is as much as about having a relaxed and joyful heart as it is about believing and doing the right thing, as much about proper energy as about proper truth.
Ronald Rolheiser
#18. Evolution works through this principle: the survival of the fittest. One of the essential elements of Christian discipleship demands that we work for this principle: the survival of the weakest and the gentlest.
Ronald Rolheiser
#19. We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly. In that sense, readying ourselves for death is really an ever-widening entry into life.
Ronald Rolheiser
#20. Every choice is a renunciation. Indeed. Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one's back on many others.
Ronald Rolheiser
#21. Charity is appeased when some rich person gives money to the poor while justice asks why one person can be that rich when so many are poor.
Ronald Rolheiser
#23. Faith is not a question of basking in the certainty that there is a God and that God is taking care of us. Many of us are never granted this kind of assurance. Certitude is not the real substance of faith. Faith is a way of seeing things.
Ronald Rolheiser
#24. The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land; and the quality of justice in the land will be judged by how the weakest and most vulnerable groups in society ('widows, orphans, and strangers') fared while you were alive.
Ronald Rolheiser
#25. You feel your own life - your heart, your mind, your body, your sexuality, the people and things you are connected to - and you spontaneously fill with the exclamation: "God, it feels great to be alive!" That's delight.
Ronald Rolheiser
#26. Near the end of our lives, many of us struggle to move beyond the death of our dreams, beyond how we have been wounded and cheated, and beyond all the resentments that come with aging.
Ronald Rolheiser
#27. Spirituality is about what we do about the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros.
Ronald Rolheiser
#28. Loneliness is simply the felt experience of our "Obediential Potency." In our loneliness, "in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable,"18 we experience our nature, learn the reason why God had made us, and are pushed out of ourselves in order to move toward that end.
Ronald Rolheiser
#29. The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.
Ronald Rolheiser
#30. In Western culture, the joyous shouting of children often irritates us because it interferes with our depression. That is why we have invented a term, hyperactivity, so that we can, in good conscience, sedate the spontaneous joy in many of our children.
Ronald Rolheiser
#31. The resurrection tells us it is never too late. Every so often we will be surprised. We must believe that the stone will be rolled back, and we must be ready to poke out our timid heads, take off the linen bindings of death, and walk free for a time, breathing resurrection air.
Ronald Rolheiser
#32. Present injustices exist not so much because simple individuals are acting in bad faith or lacking in charity, but because huge, impersonal systems (that seem beyond the control of the individuals acting within them) disprivilege some even as they unduly privilege others.
Ronald Rolheiser
#33. Our aspirations for love and knowledge are limitless, yet our capability of fulfilling these aspirations is always limited, no matter how good a situation we are in. For this reason we are, this side of heaven, always somewhat lonely.
Ronald Rolheiser
#34. The highest compliment we can give to God, our Creator, is to thoroughly enjoy the gift of life. One should never look a gift universe in the mouth! The best way to pay for a beautiful moment is to enjoy it.
Ronald Rolheiser
#35. Anyone who deeply and honestly shares with us the struggles of her heart, her pains and fears, helps to make us more free. This is so because her story is really, in some way, our story. It is everyone's story.
Ronald Rolheiser
#36. This is perhaps the greatest moral challenge Jesus left us: We all do pretty well in love when the persons we are loving are warm and gracious, but can we be gracious and mellow in the face of bitterness, jealousy, hatred, withdrawal? That's the litmus test of love.
Ronald Rolheiser
#37. Without making any moral judgements whatsoever, one can say that self-indulgence and excessive self-preoccupation are the antithesis of genuine awareness.
Ronald Rolheiser
#38. Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one.
Ronald Rolheiser
#39. True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.
Ronald Rolheiser
#40. Sanctity has to do with gratitude. To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less.
Ronald Rolheiser
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