Quotes from Richard Rohr

I worry about "true believers" who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Mother Teresa learned to do.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and

Higher stages always empathetically include the lower, or they are not higher stages!

Yet historically, the teaching of original sin started us off on the wrong foot—with a no instead of a yes, with a mistrust instead of a trust.

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems.

Until you meet a benevolent God and a benevolent universe, until you realize that the foundation of all is love, you will not be at home in this world.

First-half-of-life religion is almost always about various types of purity codes or "thou shalt nots" to keep us up, clear, clean, and together, like good Boy and Girl Scouts. A certain kind of "purity" and self-discipline is also "behovely," at least for a while in the first half of life, as the Jewish Torah brilliantly presents.

Even with all the best intentions in the world, given our different temperaments, backgrounds, and the way we process our data and information, we are going to step on one another's toes. Two people with absolutely good will can deeply hurt one another. Good people hurt one another because we all come at reality in different ways. That's why, for Jesus, the only way to achieve union is through forgiveness, not through making sin impossible.

God's greatest ally is reality itself. God's greatest revelation is what is (see Romans 1:20)—not what we want it to be, and not even what it should be—not abstract theories but concrete encounters.

Christians are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth more than "those who are going to heaven.

Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and "unknowing," and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree.

The major heresy of the Western churches is that they have largely turned around the very meaning of faith—not knowing and not needing to know—into its exact opposite: demanding to know and insisting that we do know!

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life's problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!

John Dominic Crossan demonstrates convincingly through art that "the West lost and the East kept the original Easter vision.

Like apples of gold in a silver setting is a word that is aptly spoken. It is a golden ring, an ornament of finest gold, such is a wise apology to an attentive ear." —Proverbs 25:11–12

The self that begins the journey is not the self that arrives at the Gospel. The self that begins is the self that we think ourselves to be, the superior self we want to be. This is the self that dies along the way— until 'no one' is left. This is the true self that all Great Religion talks about, the self bigger than death yet born of death, a different self than the private I, a self transformed by God and transformed in God.

true biblical faith leaves you very vulnerable to reality, because now there is no place to hide. No wonder we prefer abstractions over the actual! We can hide behind abstractions, but Incarnation leaves you both utterly exposed and constantly invited.   incorporation

I do not want to belong to a religion that cannot kneel.

In the second half of life, we are not demanding our American constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness or that people must have our same experiences; rather, simple meaning now suffices, and that becomes in itself a much deeper happiness. As the body cannot live without food, so the soul cannot live without meaning.

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves. The very fact that so many religious people have to so vigorously prove and defend their salvation theories makes one seriously doubt whether they have experienced divine mirroring at any great depth.

Every resurrection story seems to strongly affirm an ambiguous—yet certain—presence in very ordinary settings, like walking on the road to Emmaus with a stranger, roasting fish on the beach, or what appeared like a gardener to the Magdalene

God can help you get what you want, which is still a self-centered desire, instead of God's much better role—which is to help you know what you really desire (Luke 11:13; Matthew 7:11).

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

The concern was about getting the beginning right, and then life and eternity would take care of themselves. We have been preoccupied with getting the end right, for some reason.