Rohr Quotes

#1. Richard Rohr said, If we don't learn to transform the pain, we'll transfer it.

Brennan Manning

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

Richard Rohr

#3. 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.

Richard Rohr

#4. The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.

Richard Rohr

#5. 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.

Richard Rohr

#6. Egoic consciousness is the one we all normally operate with, until we are told there is something else! Every culture teaches egoic consciousness in different ways. At that level it is all about me, my preferences, my choices, my needs, my desires and me and my group as the central reference point.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#8. 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?

Richard Rohr

#9. most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are!

Richard Rohr

#10. 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

#11. All mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning.

Richard Rohr

#12. Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

Richard Rohr

#13. 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

#14. God does not change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change.

Richard Rohr

#15. 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

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

Richard Rohr

#17. 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.

Richard Rohr

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Richard Rohr

#21. My favorite animal in the park is the grizzly, icnonic, graceful, and with eyes that seem to know, and what they know is sad.

Danielle Rohr

#22. 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.

Richard Rohr

#23. The very unfortunate result of this preoccupation with order, control, safety, pleasure, and certitude is that a high percentage of people never get to the contents of their own lives!

Richard Rohr

#24. 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

#25. The joyful acceptance of a limited world, of which I am only a small moment and limited part - this is probably the clearest indication of a man in his fullness.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#27. 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

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

Richard Rohr

#29. People who know who they are find it the easiest to know who they aren't.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#31. It's not correct to say Jesus is God. Now, don't run and report me to the bishop, all right? It's not correct to say that - Jesus is the union of the human and the divine. That's different.

Richard Rohr

#32. 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.

Richard Rohr

#33. 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.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#35. Your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).

Richard Rohr

#36. This realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own.

Richard Rohr

#37. The would-be maturing believer is not challenged to any adult faith or service to the world, much less mystical union. Everyone ends up in a muddled middle, where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as William Butler Yeats put it.

Richard Rohr

#38. 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.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#41. Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.

Richard Rohr

#42. Great love is always a discovery, a revelation, a wonderful surprise, a falling into "something" much bigger and deeper that is literally beyond us and larger than us.

Richard Rohr

#43. 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.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#45. Death is not a changing of worlds as most imagine, as much as the walls of this world infinitely expanding.

Richard Rohr

#46. Francis's all-night prayer, "Who are you, O God, and who am I?" is probably a perfect prayer, because it is the most honest prayer we can offer.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#48. The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them.

Richard Rohr

#49. What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change. It will think up a thousand other things to be concerned about or be moralistic about - anything rather than giving up "who I think I am" and "who I need to be to look good.

Richard Rohr

#50. I guess prophets are those who do not care whether you are ready to hear their message. They say it because it has to be said and because it is true.

Richard Rohr

#51. 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

#52. If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God!

Richard Rohr

#53. Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.

Richard Rohr

#54. 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.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Richard Rohr

#60. Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

Richard Rohr

#61. 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

#62. We don't think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#64. 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

#65. 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.

Richard Rohr

#66. 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.

Richard Rohr

#67. 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.

Richard Rohr

#68. A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.

Richard Rohr

#69. 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.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#71. 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

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

Richard Rohr

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. The way to transmute the pain of life is to reveal the wounded side of things, evil, even, and then place the wound inside of sacred space. The Bible is about naming, facing, and then forgiving the wounds of history.

Richard Rohr

#77. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

Richard Rohr

#78. We moved from wondering to answering, which has not served us well at all.

Richard Rohr

#79. If you can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then you will find that when you speak, your words will be more well-chosen and calm. Francis

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#81. 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.

Richard Rohr

#82. We have been shown how to fight hate without becoming hate ourselves. We have been given a Companion and a Friend and not just a good idea. We have been given joy in the midst of failure, and not just a way of winning or being right.

Richard Rohr

#83. eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while.

Richard Rohr

#84. 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.

Richard Rohr

#85. God for us, God alongside us, God within us.

Richard Rohr

#86. 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.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#88. 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.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#90. 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.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#92. 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.

Richard Rohr

#93. Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.

Richard Rohr

#94. 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.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr

#97. 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.

Richard Rohr

#98. We do not handle suffering. Suffering handles us.

Richard Rohr

#99. How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe.

Richard Rohr

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

Richard Rohr