Quotes from Richard Rohr

This new coherence, a unified field inclusive of the paradoxes, is precisely what gradually characterizes a second-half-of-life person. It feels like a return to simplicity after having learned from all the complexity. Finally, at last, one has lived long enough to see that "everything belongs,"4 even the sad, absurd, and futile parts.

If you can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then you will find that when you speak, your words will be more well-chosen and calm. Francis

Salvation for Paul is an ontological and cosmological message (which is solid) before it ever becomes a moral or psychological one (which is always unstable).

Begin with a concrete moment of encounter, based in this physical world, and the soul universalizes from there, so that what is true here becomes true everywhere else too.

God has worked anonymously since the very beginning—it has always been an inside and secret sort of job. The Spirit seems to work best underground. When aboveground, humans start fighting about it.

God can never be experienced apart from your best interests being involved.

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life.

Remember, it is not the brand name that matters. It is that God's heart be made available and active on this earth.

we have faith in Christ so we can have the faith of Christ.

The universe story and the human story are a play of forces rational and nonrational, conscious and unconscious; of fate and fortune, nature and nurture. Forces of good and evil play out their tragedies and their graces—leading us to catastrophes, backtracking, mutations, transgressions, regroupings, enmities, failures, mistakes, and impossible dilemmas.

What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros! It always draws, creates, and connects things.

Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. To allow what God for some reason allows—and uses. And to suffer ever so slightly what God suffers eternally. Often, this has little to do with believing the right things about God—beyond the fact that God is love itself.

Good religion keeps God free for people and keeps people free for God. You cannot improve on that.

We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness

Just do it better yourself and don't waste any time criticizing others or the past! This, in fact, purifies your own commitment and motivation.

Comfortable people tend to see the church as a quaint antique shop where they can worship old things as substitutes for eternal things.

Traveling the road of healthy religion and true contemplation will lead to calmly held boundaries, which need neither to be defended constantly nor abdicated in the name of "friendship." This road is a "narrow road that few travel upon" these days (Matt. 7:14). It is what many of us like to call "the Third Way": the tertium quid that emerges only when you hold the tension of opposites.

So now we move toward the goal, the very purpose of human life, "another intensity…a deeper communion," as Eliot calls it, that which the container is meant to hold, support, and foster.

Faith is the opposite of resentment, cynicism, and negativity. Faith is always, finally, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Faith actually begins to create what it desires. Faith always recreates the good world.

You cannot know anything spiritually by saying it is a not-that : you can only know it by meeting it in its precise and irreplaceable thisness and honoring it there.

You do not climb up to your True Self. You fall into it, so don't avoid all falling

I would almost describe spirituality as a concern for one's being, one's inner motivation and attitude, one's real inner Source, as opposed to any primary concern for one's "doing." Doing will always take care of itself when your being is right. It is our preoccupation with external forms and successes that makes us superficial, judgmental, split off and often just downright wrong—without knowing it.   god

Contemplation is waiting patiently for the gaps to be filled in, and it does not insist on quick closure or easy answers. It never rushes to judgment, and in fact avoids making quick judgments because judgments have more to do with egoic, personal control than with a loving search for truth.

You cannot avoid sin or mistake anyway (Romans 5:12), but if you try too fervently, it often creates even worse problems.