Richard Rohr
I'm not trying to make political statements ,but theological statements. How can religion get itself so identified with one political party, exclusionary world views, or with "pelvic morality" as the defining issues of the Gospel? Jesus surely didn't. Jesus said to "preach the gospel to all nations", which means we do not just talk to ourselves.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Perfect
We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.Collection: Law
Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate.Collection: Jobs
It’s a gift to joyfully recognize and accept our own smallness and ordinariness. Then you are free with nothing to live up to, nothing to prove, and nothing to protect. Such freedom is my best description of Christian maturity, because once you know that your “I” is great and one with God, you can ironically be quite content with a small and ordinary “I.” No grandstanding is necessary. Any question of your own importance or dignity has already been resolved once and for all and forever.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Simple
"Christ" is bigger than the Earth planet. If tomorrow we discover life on another planet, the whole "Jesus" piece would not make sense anymore. If he did everything for just us on this planet he wouldn't be the savior of the "world."Collection: Jesus
If you do not transform your wounds you will transmit them.Collection: Ifs
People who think they can just do a non-stop flight to mystical, non-dual thinking, to get it out without going through the process, are usually not right. That's airy-fairy thinking. They have to wait until they are hurt themselves, or they are cheated, or lied to or betrayed, and they will see that their non-dual thinking is not tested, or truly a gift of the spirit. It's simply fuzzy thinking.Collection: Hurt
What I wish I had said in the book [Falling Upward] is that part of the attraction of conservative religions, such as Mormonism, Mennonite, Amish, groups we would consider very traditional, is that they actually do the first half of life very well. They are often very happy people.Collection: Book
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.Collection: Men
People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.Collection: People
A mystic doesn’t say “I believe.” They say “I know.” A true mystic will ironically speak with that self-confidence but at the same time with a kind of humility. So when you see that combination of calm self-confidence, certitude, and humility all at the same time you have the basis for mysticism in general.Collection: Believe
The real spiritual journey is work. You can make a naïve assertion that you trust in Jesus, but until it is tested a good, oh, 200 times, I doubt very much that it's true.Collection: Spiritual
A paradox is a seeming contradiction, always demanding a change on the side of the observer. If we look at almost all things honestly we see everything has a character of paradox to it. Everything, including ourselves.Collection: Character
Men and women are most alike at their most mature and soulful levels. Men and women are most different only at their most immature and merely physical levels.Collection: Men
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Choices
Advent is not about a sentimental waiting for the Baby Jesus.Collection: Baby
What some now call 'emerging Christianity' or 'the emerging church' is not something you join, establish, or invent. You just name it and then you see it everywhere- already in place! Such nongroup groups, the 'two or three' gathered in deep truth, create a whole new level of affiliation, dialogue, and friendship.Collection: Names
Religion was made to order to "save the world," to use a phrase Christians use so much, but we really haven't been doing a good job of it for centuries. It's heartbreaking really.Collection: Christian
When we can see the image of God where we don't want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own.Collection: Love
It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Jesus
Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody.Collection: People
Jesus is never upset at sinners; he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners.Collection: Jesus
If you don't transform your suffering, you'll transmit it.Collection: Suffering
Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here.Collection: Running
Every viewpoint is a view from a point.Collection: Views
Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Biblical
It is only through the holes in our soul that we break out and God breaks through.Collection: Break Through
THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky -journey. It's a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty or failure. On this journey the man learns to trust God more than he trusts a sense of right and wrong or his own sense of self-worth.Collection: Adventure
You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and a willingness to not know-and not even need to know. This ever widens and deepens your perspective. This is how you allow and encounter Mystery and move into the contemplative zone.Collection: Strong
Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often thats what we want - a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems.Collection: Respect
In solitude, at last, we’re able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presenceCollection: Solitude
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.Collection: Knowing
Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.Collection: Jobs
You surrender to love; you do not accomplish love by willpower.Collection: Love You
As to his gospel, Jesus Christ came into the world as the image of the invisible God to communicate to us that not only did we not need to be afraid of God, but that God is more for us than we are ourselves or one another. God's love is infinite, and unstoppable, and will win!Collection: Jesus
The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.Collection: Fire
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?Collection: Differences
Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will.Collection: People
The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God, not by doing it right, but by doing it wrong.Collection: Surprise
All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.Collection: Pain
Notice that whenever we suffer pain, the mind is always quick to identify with the negative aspects of things and replay them over and over again, wounding us deeply. Almost all humans have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) of the mind, which is why so many people become fearful, hate-filled, and wrapped around their negative commentaries. This pattern must be recognized early and definitively. Peace of mind is actually an oxymoron. When you're in your mind, you're hardly ever at peace, and when you're at peace, you're never only in your mind.Collection: Pain
Everything has to be understood in opposition to something else. For some dang reason, the ego prefers to make one side better than the other, so we choose. And we decide males are better than females, America is better than Canada, Democrats are better than Republicans. And for most people, once this decision is made, it is amazing the amount of blindness they become capable of. They really don't see what's right in front of them. Once you see this, it's an amazing breakthrough, and that is the starting place for moving away from dualistic thinking.Collection: Moving