Richard Rohr
God is always drawing us closer, blow by blow and bit by bit. And most of the time we do not even know it is happening.Collection: Blow
To keep the middle coming back, you can't say some radically conservative or radically progressive things. That's been the bane of organized religion. It makes me wonder if Jesus' first definition of the church as "two or three gathered in my name" is not still the best way.Collection: Jesus
It's important to note that Jesus and Christ are two different faith affirmations. Hardly any Christians have been taught that - they think "Christ" is Jesus's last name.Collection: Christian
If you're the head of the organization that has to pay salaries, bills and keep the money coming, you have to be concerned with pleasing the middle. I find it means you have to dumb down your message to something less radical than the gospel. It can't be the real gospel. It has to be "churchiness" that pleases everyone, so they come back next Sunday and keep putting money in the collection plate. I don't mean that in a cynical way. I just think it's what happens.Collection: Real
Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.Collection: People
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.Collection: Self
Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.Collection: Atheist
Jesus praised faith and trust – even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall, or to fail, and not to fall apart.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Eye
I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.Collection: Teaching
Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.Collection: Religious
God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.Collection: Great Love
The message of "falling" - failure, death, crucifixion, whatever you want to say - is not really that. Some sort of falling is really found in all the world's religions, just in different languages.Collection: Fall
People wanted to me to describe more about what I call "the container," and then describe what the second half of life feels like.Collection: People
When I choose the title [for my book], which was my favorite title, I felt sure there was going to be a dozen books maybe with that name already because it's so obvious to me that that's the message. I was surprised it hasn't been the title of a single book. Well, there is a Shel Silverstein children's book called Falling Upwards. But no one has chosen Falling Upward as a title and I'm very happy it's right on the cover.Collection: Children
We don't have much wisdom about the second half when things really open up and end up looking a lot more progressive. In my own Catholic church, for example, we're sort of circling the wagons today by thinking that more moral strictures, more exclusionary rules on this or that, that that's going to do for the first half of life. I don't think it really does.Collection: Thinking
What healthy religion is saying is that the real life is both now and later. You have to taste the Real first of all now. The constant pattern, however, is that most Christians either move both backwards (religion as nostalgia) or into the distant future (religion as carrot on the stick) and consistently avoid where everything really happens and mattersthe present moment.Collection: Faith
I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so.Collection: Religious
It is so important to balance orthodoxy with orthopraxy.Collection: Balance
Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth.Collection: Jesus
The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.Collection: Home
We Catholics must admit that there is a constant temptation among us to avoid the lectionary and the Word of God for private and pious devotions that usually have little power to actually change us or call our ego assumptions into question.Collection: Temptation
We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.Collection: Soul
Today we need whatever methods or help we can receive to allow the Christian message to take us to a deeper level of transformation.Collection: Christian
We grow up as natural optimists as Americans. Catholic priests were so hopeful as we watched the Vatican II experience. Yet, it's a punch in the belly to see what has happened in the church and the world. Dualistic thinking seems to have taken over the church and our politics to a really neurotic degree.Collection: Growing Up
If you stay in the mainstream of life, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we're in our middle years, when we've experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines.Collection: Years
If you stay in the mainstream of life, in other words, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we're in our middle years, when we've experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines. 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. In other words, you hold onto your values, but you do it much more inclusively, humbly and in an open ended way. Suffering takes you there.Collection: Years
Faith is not a means to something further. It is not something we do in order to get to heaven. Faith is its own end. To have faith is already to have come alive.Collection: Mean
If you depend on being emotionally inspired or newly motivated, you will need a new fix almost every day.Collection: Needs
God tries to first create a joyous yes inside of you, far more than any kind of no . . . Just saying no is resentful dieting, whereas finding your deeper yes, and eating from that table, is always a spiritual banquet.Collection: Spiritual
Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.Collection: Firsts
The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.Collection: Gratitude
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.Collection: Christian
When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.Collection: Kings
Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.Collection: Honest
there is no path to peace, but peace itself is the path.Collection: Path
The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.Collection: Imagination
Remember finally, that the ashes that were on your forehead are created from the burnt palms of last Palm Sunday. New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.Collection: New Beginnings
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Rivers
You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality.Collection: Reality
Nature religions, for example, speak of summer, fall, winter, and spring. They see the downward path as the necessary prelude to any kind of upward path again. Our vocabulary is different. We Christians speak of the death and resurrection of Jesus. But unfortunately, we've projected it all onto Jesus and it didn't become a life agenda for the rest of us.Collection: Summer
After 32 years as a priest , I think its fair to say that most institutional churches are very limited in addressing higher levels of spiritual consciousness.Collection: Spiritual
Once God and grace move us to the second half of life, religion becomes a mystical matter, rather than a moral matter.Collection: Moving
There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.Collection: Mistake
In terms of the ego, most religions teach in some way that all of us must die before we die, and then we will not be afraid of dying. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as whenever you are not in control.Collection: Strong
What we know about God is important, but what we do with what we know about God is even more important.Collection: Important
If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.Collection: Pain