Quotes from Richard Rohr

The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism.

Having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the Soul. —Walt Whitman

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 is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.

Love is always stronger than death, and unto that love you have now returned.

The problem is solved. Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days. Not only is it "Always Advent," but every day can now be Christmas because the one we thought we were just waiting for has come once and for all.

New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.

most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are!

That is true for both liberals and conservatives: the liberals deny the vertical arm of the cross (transcendence and tradition); the conservatives deny the horizontal (breadth and inclusivity).

The place which God takes in our soul he will never vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there… The soul who contemplates this is made like the one who is contemplated. Lady Julian of Norwich, Showings On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you. John 14:20

That's what happens in the early stages of contemplation. We wait in silence. In silence all our usual patterns assault us. Our patterns of control, addiction, negativity, tension, anger, and fear assert themselves. That's why most people give up rather quickly. When Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, the first things that show up are wild beasts (Mark 1:13). Contemplation is not first of all consoling. It's only real.

To know the Lord and his ways," as the Jewish prophets put it,250 has very little to do with intelligence and very much to do with a wonderful mixture of confidence and surrender. People who live in this way tend to be the calmest and happiest people I know. They draw their life from the inside out.

Thomas Merton who said: "The will of God is not a 'fate' to which we must submit, but a creative act in our life that produces something absolutely new, something hitherto unforeseen by the laws and established patterns. Our cooperation consists not solely in conforming to external laws, but in opening our wills to this mutually creative act."5

Listen to his dangerous and inclusionary thinking: "My Father's sun shines on the good and the bad, his rain falls on the just and the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). Or "Don't pull out the weeds or you might pull out the wheat along with it. Let the weeds and the wheat both grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:29–30). If I had presented such fuzzy thinking in my moral theology class, I would have gotten an F!

You rest in God, not in outcomes.

We have become human doings more than human beings, and the verb "rest," as Jesus uses it, is largely foreign to us.

It is the things that you cannot do anything about and the things that you cannot do anything with that do something with you.

Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.

Francis's all-night prayer, "Who are you, O God, and who am I?" is probably a perfect prayer, because it is the most honest prayer we can offer.

No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.

His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does.

We don't think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.

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.

What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age. —CARL JUNG No wise person ever wanted to be younger. —NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM

Before the truth 'sets you free', it tends to make you miserable.