Richard Rohr
Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through!Collection: Overcoming
The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection—and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Relationship
We cannot avoid the globalization of knowledge and information. When I was a boy growing up in Kansas, I could never think about a Buddhist, or a Hindu, or Muslim, or even a Protestant - I grew up in such a Catholic ghetto. That's not possible anymore, unless you live in a cave or something. So either we have knowledge of what the other religions and other denominations are saying, and how they tie into the common thread, or we end up just being dangerously ignorant of other people and therefore prejudiced.Collection: Buddhist
The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.Collection: Practice
Prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us.Collection: Letting Go
The ego knows itself by comparison.Collection: Ego
When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselvesCollection: Care
If unconditional love, loyalty, and obedience are the tickets to an eternal life, then my black Labrador, Venus, will surely be there long before me, along with all the dear animals in nature who care for their young at great cost to themselves and have suffered so much at the hands of humans.Collection: Loyalty
Spirituality is about being ready. All the spiritual disciplines of your life - prayer, study, meditation or ritual, religious vows - are there so you can break through to the eternal. Spirituality is about awakening the eyes, the ears, the heart so you can see what's always happening right in front of you.Collection: Spiritual
The people who know God well - the mystics, the hermits, those who risk everything to find God - always meet a lover, not a dictator. God is never found to be an abusive father or a tyrannical mother, but always a lover who is more than we dared hope for. How different than the "account manager" that most people seem to worship. God is a lover who receives and forgives everything.Collection: Mother
To give, and not demand that others receive . . . that is the crossover point to maturity. . .Collection: Maturity
Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).Collection: Christian
The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.Collection: Morning
My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.Collection: Religious
Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.Collection: Moon
As you look back on a year almost ended, recall the ways in which God has been inviting you to return, again and again, to Love which is the same as returning to GodCollection: Years
We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.Collection: Fighting
A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.Collection: People
Life is not, nor ever has been, a straight line forward ... Life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order.Collection: Order
If our love of God does not directly influence, and even change, how we engage in the issues of our time on this earth, I wonder what good religion is.Collection: Issues
I have committed myself to joy. I have come to realize that those who make space for joy, those who prefer nothing to joy, those who desire the utter reality, will most assuredly have it. We must not be afraid to announce it to refugees, slum dwellers, saddened prisoners, angry prophets. Now and then we must even announce it to ourselves. In this prison of now, in this cynical and sophisticated age, someone must believe in joy.Collection: Believe
The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.Collection: People
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Christian
You come to God not by being strong, but by being weak; not by being right, but through your mistakes.Collection: Strong
Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about GodCollection: Jesus
It is at the bottom where we find grace; for like water, grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools up.Collection: Water
The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.Collection: Teacher
The journey never happens alone.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Ocean
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.Collection: Spiritual
Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.Collection: Names
The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.Collection: Reality
There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it's enough.Collection: Being Yourself
Creation is a process that is still happening and we’re in on it! We are a part of this endless creativity of God.Collection: Creativity
You cannot be naïve about evil. You cannot be naïve to the reality that there are human beings and human situations which have totally identified with the dark side of reality. They are malicious. Realism teaches you to put up appropriate boundaries so that people can't do any more evil than possible. But that doesn't mean you do evil back to them.Collection: Mean
You cannot heal what you cannot acknowledge.Collection: Heal
Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Fall
The Gospel gives human suffering deep, personal, and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by connecting us to the very "pain of God".Collection: Pain
The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique.Collection: Love
Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.Collection: Prayer