Quotes from Richard Rohr

Christianity is much more about living and doing than thinking.

In the Franciscan school, God did not need to be paid in order to love and forgive God's own creation for its failures. Love cannot be bought by some "necessary sacrifice"; if it could, it would not and could not work its transformative effects.

Perhaps the True Self—and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)—will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion. Some will think I am arrogantly talking about being "personally divine" and eagerly dismiss this way of talking about resurrection as heresy, arrogance, or pantheism.

spirituality" which means that things are only found to be true in the doing of them.

Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean "not true," which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!

Jesus himself says, "Do not believe those who say 'Lord, Lord' " (Matthew 7:21, Luke 6:46, italics added). He says it is those who "do it right" that matter, not those who "say it right." Yet verbal orthodoxy has been Christianity's preoccupation, at times even allowing us to burn people at the stake for not "saying it right.

Because far too many religious folks do not seriously pursue this "reverence humming within them," they do not recognize

Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be? "Christ" is a word for the Primordial Template ("Logos") through whom "all things came into being, and not one thing had its being except through him" (John 1:3).

All who hold any kind of unexplainable hope believe in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not, and even if they don't believe Jesus was physically raised from the dead.

To hold the full mystery of life is always to endure its other half, which is the equal mystery of death and doubt. To know anything fully is always to hold that part of it which is still mysterious and unknowable.

Without the mediation of Christ, we will be tempted to overplay the distance and the distinction between God and humanity.

Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.

If matter is inhabited by God, then matter is somehow eternal, and when the creed says we believe in the "resurrection of the body," it means our bodies too and not just Jesus's body! As in him, so also in all of us. As in all of us, so also in him.

The God we've been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.

Perfect spirituality is just to imitate God.

Trust the process.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events. This deeper discovery is largely what religious people mean by "finding their soul.

What if Christ is a name for the transcendent within of every "thing" in the universe? What if Christ is a name for the immense spaciousness of all true Love? What if Christ refers to an infinite horizon that pulls us from within and pulls us forward too? What if Christ is another name for everything—in its fullness?

What Richard does is more like what Jesus did when he spoke in parables: He takes you to see from one angle, and then backs up and brings you to see from another angle, and then another, and then another, until a whole new way of seeing begins to dawn on you.

Christianity's true and unique story line has always been incarnation. If creation is "very good" (Genesis 1:31) at its very inception, how could such a divine agenda ever be undone by any human failure to fully cooperate? "Very good" sets us on a trajectory toward resurrection, it seems to me. God does not lose or fail. That is what it means to be God.

The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things. —Mechtild of Magdeburg (1212–1282)

Perhaps that's why faith is so rare and religion so widespread: because religion is very often a means to maintain our familiar image of God, even when it's pathological and destructive. We feel better with what we know, even when it does us in.

spirituality

Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society.