Quotes from Richard Rohr

A sacred myth keeps a people healthy, happy, and whole—even inside their pain. They give deep meaning, and pull us into "deep time" (which encompasses all time, past and future, geological and cosmological, and not just our little time or culture).

The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find "the pearl of great price" that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

Everything finally belongs, and you are a part of it. This knowing and this enjoying are a good description of salvation.

Death is not a changing of worlds as most imagine, as much as the walls of this world infinitely expanding.

We recognized hierarchical or vertical accountability but almost no lateral accountability to one another—as Jesus hoped for the world when he prayed that we "all might be one" (John 17:21). A corporate reading of the Gospel gives hope and justice to history, but less control over individuals, which is probably why clergy who do the preaching don't like it too much and thus don't preach it too much.

God is the ultimate nonviolent one, so we dare not accept any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion.

When you are present, you will know the Presence. It is that simple, and it is that hard.

It is all one continuum of Incarnation. Who we are in God is who we all are. Everything else is changing and passing away.

We do not want to embark on a further journey if it feels like going down, especially after we have put so much sound and fury into going up. This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?

Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.

Hope cannot be had by the individual if everything is corporately hopeless. It is hard to heal individuals when the whole thing is seen as unhealable.

Creation itself, the natural world, already "believes" the Gospel, and lives the pattern of death and resurrection, even if unknowingly. The natural world "believes" in necessary suffering as the very cycle of life: just observe the daily dying of the sun so all things on this planet can live, the total change of the seasons, the plants and trees along with it, the violent world of animal predators and prey.

When we learn to love anyone or anything, It is because they have somehow, if just for a moment, Mirrored us truthfully yet compassionately to ourselves.

Seventy times seven is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards.

I have never been separate from God, nor can I be, except in my mind.

Your DNA is divine, and the divine indwelling is never earned by any behavior or any ritual, but only recognized and realized (see Romans 11: 6; Ephesians 2: 8–10) and fallen in love with.

God comes to you disguised as your life," as my friend Paula D'Arcy so wisely says.

All we can do is keep our egos out of the way, note and weep over our defensive behaviors, keep our various centers from closing down—and the Presence that is surely the Highest Power is then obvious, all-embracing, and immediately effective. The immediate embrace is from God's side.

Christ forever keeps Jesus firmly inside the Trinity, not a mere later add-on or a somewhat arbitrary incarnation. Trinitarianism keeps God as Relationship Itself from the very beginning, and not a mere monarch.

Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and short life spans as the price of life at all. Feeling that sadness, and even its full absurdity, ironically pulls us into the general dance, the unified field, an ironic and deep gratitude for what is given—with no necessity and so gratuitously. All beauty is gratuitous. So whom can we blame when it seems to be taken away? Grace seems to be at the foundation of everything.

Remember, "God" is just a word for Reality—with a Face! And occasionally Interface (which some call "prayer" or "love").

Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness.

On a man's journey, everything has its place. Our failures, heartbreaks, defeats, and victories; our wounds, dreams, and passions; our stops and our starts-all have a place in our story, and all have a place in our transformation from shadow men to real men. Everything has meaning, and everything belongs.

You do not have to see the sun to know that it is still shining.