Quotes from Richard Rohr

Matter and Spirit mirror one another and reveal the depths of one another.

For Paul, Christ is "that mystery which for endless ages has been kept secret" (Romans 16:25–27). And a well-kept secret it still remains for most Christians.

Francis "without having a specific feminist program…contributed to the feminizing of Christianity."2 French historian André Vauchez, in his critical biography of Francis, adds that this integration of the feminine "constitutes a fundamental turning point in the history of Western spirituality."3

Both Christ cosmically and Jesus personally make the unbelievable believable and the unthinkable desirable. Jesus Christ is a Sacrament of the Presence of God for the whole universe!

humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.

Does the Almighty One operate from a scarcity model of love and forgiveness?

reality itself, our reality, my limited and sometimes misinterpreted experience, still becomes the revelatory place for God.

What if Christ is another name for everything—in its fullness?

Whenever we get defensive or go emotionally up and down, this is a sign that we are attached to a self-image.

The Christ, especially when twinned with Jesus, is a clear message about universal love and necessary suffering as the divine pattern—starting with the three persons of the Trinity, where God is said to be both endlessly outpouring and self-emptying.

The advantage of those on the further journey is that they can still remember and respect the first language and task. They have transcended but also included all that went before. In fact, if you cannot include and integrate the wisdom of the first half of life, I doubt if you have moved to the second. Never throw out the baby with the bathwater. People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. They are not mere iconoclasts or rebels.

you never think yourself into a new way of living. You invariably live yourself into a new way of thinking.

Without a sense of the inherent sacredness of the world—of every tiny bit of life and death—we struggle to see God in our own reality, let alone to respect reality, protect it, or love it.

Christians, you are Christ…for there is but One Son of God.

Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For another union, a deeper communion —T. S. ELIOT, "EAST COKER

Any kind of authentic God experience will usually feel like love or suffering, or both. It will connect you to Full Reality at ever-new breadths, and depths "until God will be all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28).

To finally surrender ourselves to healing, we must have three spaces opened within us—and all at the same time: our opinionated head, our closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body. That is the work of spirituality—and it is work.

The proof that you are a Christian is that you can see Christ everywhere else.

How you get there is where you arrive.

Authentic God experience always expands your seeing and never constricts it. What else would be worthy of God? In God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more. The more you transcend your small ego, the more you can include.

Jesus puts healed people back on themselves, never creating any kind of dependency or codependency on him that will keep them from their own empowerment. All people must learn to draw from their own Implanted Spirit, which is the only thing that will help them in the long run anyway. Jesus gives them the courage to trust their own "inner Christ"—and not just its outer manifestation in himself. Go reread the Gospels and see if that is not true!

When you look at any other person, a flower, a honeybee, a mountain—anything—you are seeing the incarnation of God's love for you and the universe you call home.

Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with.

Do a violent people want, create and need a violent God, or has the textual presentation of a sometimes violent God legitimated and even blessed our own violent history?