Quotes from Richard Rohr

It is strange that when people have so much, they are so anxious about not having enough—to do, to see, to own, to fix, to control, to change.

As the old joke put it: It is forbidden to smoke while you are praying! But it is wonderful and meritorious to pray while you are smoking!

Unless and until we can enjoy this, so much of what passes for Christianity will amount to little more than well-disguised narcissism and self-referential politics. We see this phenomenon playing out in the de facto values of people who strongly identify as Christian. Often they are more racist, classist, and sexist than non-Christians. "Others can carry the burden and the pain of injustice, but not my group," they seem to say.

Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things.

What, then, does it mean to follow Jesus? I believe that we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering, to help us see how we ourselves have been "bitten" by hatred and violence, and to know that God's heart has always been softened toward us.

Ordinary people in times of shame and doubt needed an anamchara, or a "soul friend." Soon

Don't expect or demand from groups what they usually cannot give. Doing so will make you needlessly angry and reactionary. They must and will be concerned with identity, boundaries, self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, and self-congratulation. This is their nature and purpose.

The biblical symbol of the Universal and Eternal Christ standing at both ends of cosmic time was intended to assure us that the clear and full trajectory of the world we know is an unfolding of consciousness with "all creation groaning in this one great act of giving birth" (Romans 8:22).

God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.

If you realize that there is a further journey, you might do the warm-up act quite differently, which would better prepare you for what follows.

Whatever you trust to validate you and secure you is your real god, and the Gospel is saying, "Will the real God please stand up?

God's love is perfectly free. It is not coerced by any of our good actions, nor can we lose it because of our bad actions. We are stuck with it and cannot increase-or decrease-God's love for us by anything we do or don't do.

The self-same moment that we find God in ourselves, we also find ourselves inside God

The point is that, in some ways, many humans can identify with Mary more than they can with Jesus precisely because she was not God, but the archetype for our yes to God!

Just because you do not have the right word for God does not mean you are not having the right experience.

The common word for this inner abiding place of the Spirit, which is also a place of longing, has usually been the word soul. We have our soul already—we do not "get" it by any purification process

wisely put it years ago, " Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name."1

All great spirituality is somehow about letting go.

The end is already planted in us at the beginning, and it gnaws away at us until we get there freely and consciously.

I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the "integration of the negative." Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus's revolutionary Good News, Paul's deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare lived out with such simple elegance.

Time is exactly what we do not have. What decreases in a culture of affluence is precisely and strangely time—along with wisdom and friendship. These are the very things that the human heart was created for, that the human heart feeds on and lives for. No wonder we are producing so many depressed, unhealthy and even violent people, while also leaving a huge carbon footprint on this poor planet.

The good news is that there is a guide, a kind of medical advocate, an inner compass—and it resides within each of us.

As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, " Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name."1

Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it. This is perhaps our major stumbling stone