Richard Rohr famous quotes

There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it's enough.
-- Richard Rohr

#Who I Am #Enough #Protect

The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine - that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they're talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.
-- Richard Rohr

#Talking #Goal #Empathy

The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.
-- Richard Rohr

#People #Risk #Lovers

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Spiritual #Jesus #Real

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
-- Richard Rohr

#Thinking #Way

Our culture is almost entirely prepared to not just help you create your false self, but to get very identified with it and attached to it. So, without some form of God experience, which teaches you who you are apart from that - we would say in the religious world, who you are "in" God, in the mind and heart of God - there's almost no way to get out of it.
-- Richard Rohr

#Religious #Heart #Self

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Moving #Fall #Drawing

Religion has in fact outdone culture in dualistic thinking - we've become as violent, as hateful toward our enemies, damning them to hell and whatever else, that the world doesn't look to us for wisdom, because we're trapped in the dualistic mind, instead of the mind of Christ that we were supposed to have.
-- Richard Rohr

#Thinking #Mind #Enemy

The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.
-- Richard Rohr

#Happiness #Responsibility #Journey

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Moving #Thinking #America

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Jesus #Faces #Sides

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Buddhist #Growing Up #Ghetto

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Self #People #Trying

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Ocean #Moving #Thinking

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Fighting #Mirrors #Self

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Spiritual #Teacher #Prayer

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Return #Doe #Resurrection

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Christian #Jesus #Thinking

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Prayer #Heart #Grace

To believe in Jesus, is to believe that the historic person who lived on this earth more than 2000 years ago was the image of the invisible God. That's a huge leap of faith, but it is my leap of faith, it's the act of faith of the Christian community.
-- Richard Rohr

#Christian #Jesus #Believe

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.
-- Richard Rohr

#Too Much #Waste #Bigger

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Hurt #Thinking #People

Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.
-- Richard Rohr

#Moon #Fingers #Should

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Heaven #Promise #World

When you don't need to play the victim or create victims you are FREE
-- Richard Rohr

#Play #Needs #Victim

Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world.
-- Richard Rohr

#Maturity #World #Imperfect

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Knowing #Abuse #Transition

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Biblical #Ideas #Achievement

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Years #Suffering #World

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Christian #Spiritual #Country

When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself.
-- Richard Rohr

#Firsts #Half #Wells

It is at the bottom where we find grace; for like water, grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools up.
-- Richard Rohr

#Water #Grace #Pool

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Christian #Jobs #Order

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Religious #Jesus #Imperfection

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Taken #Self #People

A good teacher teaches people how to see, not what to see.
-- Richard Rohr

#Teacher #People #Good Teacher

The school of relationships is where you learn self-knowledge. I just don't know how you could learn it sitting alone in the desert on a rock by yourself. You have to see where you fail at it. And that confrontation with your own ability - "I was again not able to love" - those are the teachable moments.
-- Richard Rohr

#School #Self #Rocks

Transformed people transform people.
-- Richard Rohr

#Wisdom #People

Your false self is always that which is passing away. Your true self doesn't go up or down, it's constant - it's a rock. Once you learn how to live there, what others say about you, your failures or successes - these don't send you on a roller coaster ride down or up. It's really the only way to peace. There's no other way to be peaceful except in the true self.
-- Richard Rohr

#Self #Rocks #Peaceful

Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.
-- Richard Rohr

#Pain

"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."
-- Richard Rohr

#Jesus #Pieces #World

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Order #Perfect #Lines

I think it's almost necessary for most people to have the freedom to pull back, and then re-enter at an adult level, where they are neither playing the victim nor creating victims, but just participating in calm, adult behavior. Because an awful lot of churches just aren't there at adult Christianity, this seems to be the norm anymore.
-- Richard Rohr

#Thinking #Creating #People

Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.
-- Richard Rohr

#Names #Creating #Special

You do need some successes as a young person. They don't inflate the ego necessarily, they just give you identity and ego structure. But, don't construct your life around creating those. Or you will become narcissistic and ego-centric. That won't get you anywhere.
-- Richard Rohr

#Creating #Giving #Ego

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Fall #Past #Ego

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Growing Up #Taken #Thinking

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Love #Spiritual #Loneliness

I think most human beings are dualistic thinkers. It gets them through the day. It gives them a sense of superiority and security - that's what the ego wants.
-- Richard Rohr

#Thinking #Giving #Ego

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Love You #Ifs And #Empowering

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God
-- Richard Rohr

#Jesus #Humanity #Mind

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!
-- Richard Rohr

#Jesus #Winning #Love Is

Jesus is never upset at sinners; he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners.
-- Richard Rohr

#Jesus #Thinking #People

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Mean #Dark #Reality

The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.
-- Richard Rohr

#Morning #Light #Sunflower

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Love #Eye #Want

Every viewpoint is a view from a point.
-- Richard Rohr

#Views #Viewpoints

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Broken #People #Trying

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Compassion #Unions

The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.
-- Richard Rohr

#Common #One Liner

Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often thatÂ’s what we want - a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems.
-- Richard Rohr

#Respect #Military #Political

...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.
-- Richard Rohr

#People #Produce #Worst

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Christian #Country #Attitude

I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.
-- Richard Rohr

#Teaching #Years #Lasts

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Jesus #Plato #Dust

One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing and action.
-- Richard Rohr

#Spiritual #Leader #Political

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Believe #Reality #Space

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. 143
-- Richard Rohr

#Real #Simple #Emotional

I am who I am in the eyes of God- nothing more and nothing less.
-- Richard Rohr

#Eye #Who I Am #I Am Who I Am

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Spiritual #Jesus #Powerful

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.
-- Richard Rohr

#People #Firsts #Break

I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others.
-- Richard Rohr

#Kindness #Heart #Thinking

If you depend on being emotionally inspired or newly motivated, you will need a new fix almost every day.
-- Richard Rohr

#Needs #Inspired #Motivated

Jesus liberated us from religion. Jesus taught simple religious practices over major theorizing.Â… 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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Religious #Jesus #Simple

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Issues #Earth #Our Love

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Meditation #Forgiving #Want

You come to God not by being strong, but by being weak; not by being right, but through your mistakes.
-- Richard Rohr

#Strong #Mistake #Weak

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

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...
-- Richard Rohr

#Names #Two #Church

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Christian #Maturity #Forever

We are just a little tiny flicker of a much larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God’s very self.
-- Richard Rohr

#Self #Flames #Littles

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
-- Richard Rohr

#Pain

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Christian #Jesus #Selfish

The journey never happens alone.
-- Richard Rohr

#Journey

God comes to you disguised as your life,
-- Richard Rohr

To give, and not demand that others receive . . . that is the crossover point to maturity. . .
-- Richard Rohr

#Maturity #Giving #Demand

The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
-- Richard Rohr

#Imagination #Darkness #Feelings

Contemplation is an alternative consciousness that refuses to identify with or feed what are only passing shows. It is the absolute opposite of addiction, consumerism or any egoic consciousness.
-- Richard Rohr

#Opposites #Addiction #Alternatives

there is no path to peace, but peace itself is the path.
-- Richard Rohr

#Path

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Mean #Order #Heaven

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Prayer #Eye #Judging

Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.
-- Richard Rohr

#Song #Singing #Praise

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 . . .
-- Richard Rohr

#Letting Go #Children #People

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.
-- Richard Rohr

#Strong #Ignorance #Ego

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody.
-- Richard Rohr

#People #Splits #Wholeness

Solitude is a courageous encounter with our naked, most raw and real self, in the presence of pure love.
-- Richard Rohr

#Real #Self #Solitude

Prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us.
-- Richard Rohr

#Letting Go #Prayer #Willing

Men must learn how to grieve, or they are inevitably angry or controlling, and they don't even know why.
-- Richard Rohr

#Grieving #Men #Angry

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

#Kings #Kingdoms #Chance

It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.
-- Richard Rohr

#Fall #Learning #Matter