Richard Rohr Quotes

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.

~ Richard Rohr

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

~ Richard Rohr

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

...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

~ Richard Rohr

...organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

~ Richard Rohr

Life is all about practicing for heaven. p 101.

~ Richard Rohr

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

Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature. You can fill in the names here with your own political disaster story. But just remember, there is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is the safest. A truly wise monarch would probably be the most effective at getting things done.

~ Richard Rohr

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

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.

~ Richard Rohr

We have been shown how to fight hate without becoming hate ourselves. We have been given a Companion and a Friend and not just a good idea. We have been given joy in the midst of failure, and not just a way of winning or being right.

~ Richard Rohr

If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms.

~ Richard Rohr

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

~ Richard Rohr

A lot of us pray as if prayer is really twisting the arm of God or convincing God to do something. We think by saying more words we’ll talk God into it. We think, “If I say it one more time, God will agree with me.” That very attitude is an alienating attitude. It keeps us in the role of doing it “right” or often enough to convince an unready or unwilling God. Wrong, wrong, wrong!19 minutes ago

~ Richard Rohr

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

Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You’re trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

~ Richard Rohr

The way to transmute the pain of life is to reveal the wounded side of things, evil, even, and then place the wound inside of sacred space. The Bible is about naming, facing, and then forgiving the wounds of history.

~ Richard Rohr

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.

~ Richard Rohr

Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.

~ Richard Rohr

True baptism allows us to reframe, and contain, the reality of evil, without needing to blame anyone else, without any need for shame or vengeance. We are all in this together, and our common wound shows itself in different ways.

~ Richard Rohr

It is crucial that Jesus is led by the Spirit. There are two wildernesses, two darknesses in the spiritual journey. One you go into by your own stupidity, by your sin, blindness, ignorance and mistakes. We all do that. But there’s another darkness. The holy darkness is the darkness that God leads us into, through and beyond. This is a necessary darkness for the journey. In a certain sense, God’s darkness is a much better teacher than light. There comes a time when you have to either go deeper into faith or you will turn back, when you have to live without knowing or you lose faith altogether. So we have the Spirit leading Jesus into the wilderness, to face the essential darkness.

~ Richard Rohr

You can unlock spiritual things only from within.

~ Richard Rohr

Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.

~ Richard Rohr

We do not handle suffering. Suffering handles us.

~ Richard Rohr

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.

~ Richard Rohr

People who have been initiated broke through in what felt like breaking down.

~ Richard Rohr

Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

~ Richard Rohr

It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE – IS – HARD.

~ Richard Rohr

When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.

~ Richard Rohr

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

~ Richard Rohr

God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.

~ Richard Rohr

Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial.

~ Richard Rohr

It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.

~ Richard Rohr

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… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

~ Richard Rohr

Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.

~ Richard Rohr

When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves

~ Richard Rohr

Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing.

~ Richard Rohr

True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.

~ Richard Rohr

In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.

~ Richard Rohr

I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.

~ Richard Rohr