Richard Rohr Quotes - Page 2

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.

God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.

Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You’re trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

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.

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.

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

If we know our original blessing, we can easily handle our original sin. If we rest in a previous dignity, we can bear insults effortlessly. If you really know your name is on some eternal list, you can let go of the irritations on the small lists of time. Ultimate security allows you to suffer small insecurity without tremendous effort. If you are tethered at some center point, it is amazing how far out you can fly and not get lost.

If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God.

The ego hates losing – even to God.

People who have been initiated "broke through in what felt like breaking down".

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.

I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in deep time, that is, Past, present, and future all at once.

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.

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

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.

You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.

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

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.

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

Seventy times seven" is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards.

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.

Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

...organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

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.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

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.

Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You'll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism "thinking" (whereas it's really your ego's narcissistic reaction to the moment). You'll position things to quickly as inferior or superior, "with me" or "against me," and most of the time you'll be wrong.

I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.