Richard Rohr
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.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Truth
Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Forgiveness
In my opinion, most organized religion does neither agentic service nor relational nurturance very well.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Forgiveness
If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach.Collection: Health
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.Collection: Health
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.Collection: Compassion
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Pain
Worship of Jesus is rather harmless and risk-free; actually following Jesus changes everything.Collection: Jesus
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 . . .Collection: Letting Go
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.Collection: Love You
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.Collection: Christian
Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world.Collection: Maturity
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Gratitude
Jesus liberated us from religion. Jesus taught simple religious practices over major theorizing. 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.Collection: Religious
The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Letting Go
A good teacher teaches people how to see, not what to see.Collection: Teacher
God comes to us disguised as our life.Collection: Our Lives
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.Collection: Mirrors
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.'Collection: Inspiring
The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.Collection: Common
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. 143Collection: Real
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.Collection: Self
God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Jesus
The ego hates losing – even to God.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Thinking
...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.Collection: People
Love is luring us forward...to the fullness of our own beingCollection: Love Is
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.Collection: Spiritual
The more one gives one's self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one's self.Collection: Self
If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.Collection: Our Lives
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.Collection: Profound
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.Collection: Heaven
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Order
True gospel authority, the authority to heal and renew things and people, is not finally found in a hierarchical office, a theological argument, a perfect law, or a rational explanation. The Crucified revealed to the world that the real power that changes people and the world is an inner authority that comes from people who have lost, let go, and are re-found on a new level.Collection: Letting Go
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.Collection: Taken
One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing and action.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Party