Quotes from Richard Rohr

The point of the Christian life is not to distinguish oneself from the ungodly, but to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and everything else. This is the full, final, and intended effect of the Incarnation—symbolized by its finality in the cross, which is God's great act of solidarity instead of judgment.

All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts. Yet we get to the whole by falling down into the messy parts - so many times, in fact, that we long and thirst for the wholeness and fullness of all things, including ourselves. I promise you this unified field is the only and lasting meaning of up.

As a priest of forty years, I find that much of the spiritual and pastoral work of churches is often ineffective at the levels of real transformation, and calls forth immense passivity and even many passive-aggressive responses

For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the "enchanting" ourselves. This leaves us alone, confused, and doubtful. There is no meaning already in place for our discovery and enjoyment.

n the second day, God separated heaven from earth (Genesis 1:6-8). Genesis does not say that the second day was good, because it is not good to separate heaven from earth. A deep religious experience will reveal that there is only one world, one reality, and it is all supernatural.

Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.

The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

When you first discharge your loyal soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is often the very birth of the soul.

Women stuff' is the hidden energy behind almost all the justice issues. The movement toward nonviolence and disarmament, the movements that deal with homelessness and refugee problems, with the raping of the earth and its resources, with sexual and physical abuse issues, with the idolatry of profit and the corporation, and with the rejection of the poor will not move beyond the present impasse until the underlying issues of power, prestige, and possessions are exposed for the lie that they are.

God seems to have created things that continue to create and recreate themselves from the inside out. It is no longer God's one-time creation or evolution; rather, God's form of creation precisely is evolution. Finally God is allowed to be fully incarnate, which was supposed to be Christianity's big trump card from the beginning! It has taken us a long time to get here, and dualistic thinkers still cannot jump the hurdle.

This needed work is indeed "spiritual warfare," as the desert monks called it, since it takes conscious and sustained struggle to be aware of the shadow self—which only takes ever more subtle disguises the "holier" you get.

For Scotus, as for Bonaventure, the Trinity is the absolute beginning point—and ending point too. Outpouring Love is the inherent shape of the universe, and when we love, only then do we fully exist in this universe. We do not need to "understand" what is happening, or who God is, before we can live in love. The will to love precedes any need to fully understand what we are doing, the Franciscan School would say.

Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which themselves are one.

A person who has found his or her True Self has learned how to live in the big picture, as a part of deep time and all of history. This change of frame and venue is called living in "the kingdom of God" by Jesus, and it is indeed a major about-face.

Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never "throw their nets into the deep" (John 21:6)

Like the Christ Mystery itself, the deep feminine often works underground and in the shadows, and—from that position—creates a much more intoxicating message. While church and culture have often denied the Divine Feminine roles, offices, and formal authority, the feminine has continued to exercise incredible power at the cosmic and personal levels.

So God, life, and destiny have to loosen the loyal soldier's grasp on your soul, which up to now has felt like the only "you" that you know and the only authority that there is. Our loyal solider normally begins to be discharged somewhere between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five, if it happens at all; before that it is usually mere rebellion or iconoclasm.

The great commandment is not thou shalt be right. The great commandment is to be in love.

The juniors are made to think that the container is all there is and all they should expect; or worse, that they are mature and home free because they believe a few right things or perform some right rituals.

Life is all about practicing for heaven. We practice by choosing union freely—ahead of time—and now. Heaven is the state of union both here and later. As now, so will it be then. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union. Everyone is in heaven when he or she has plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion.

Resurrection is incarnation coming to its logical conclusion. If God is already in everything, then everything is from glory and unto glory. We're all saved by mercy, without exception. We're all saved by grace, so there's no point in distinguishing degrees of worthiness because God alone is all good and everything else in creation participates, to varying degrees, in that one, universal goodness.

We daringly believe that God's presence was poured into a single human being, so that humanity and divinity can be seen to be operating as one in him—and therefore in us! But instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world. The second Incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God's loving union with physical creation.

We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line. We are created with an inner restlessness and call that urges us on to the risks and promises of a second half to our life. There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.