Richard Rohr Quotes

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

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

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.

Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.

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

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it toward it is, and then seeing the good as better.

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.

This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of "memory," not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.

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.

It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on.

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

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.

The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.

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.

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.

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

You can unlock spiritual things only from within.

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.

I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.

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.