Quotes from Richard Rohr

Anne Wilson Schaef

Wherever there was human suffering, Jesus was concerned about it now, and about its healing now. It is rather amazing and very sad that we pushed it all off into a future reward system for those who were "worthy"—as if any of us are.

By the feminine principle I mean everything vulnerable, interior, powerless, subtle, personal, intimate, and relational. By the masculine principle I mean everything clear, rational, linear, ordered, in control, bounded, provable, and hard. Both the feminine and masculine are good, but they must balance each other.

The second insight about steps and stages is that from your own level of development, you can only stretch yourself to comprehend people just a bit beyond yourself.

Unfortunately, the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs, rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good.

The global issues of injustice, the culture of death that we are a part of, the sufferings of the oppressed, all of these demand t hat we bring the Voice of the Spirit to these well-denied and disguised situations, and not just our own tiny judgments or anger. This i the difference between true Gospel and mere political correctness or Band-Aid liberal responses. We are holding out for the great Gospel...

It seems we are not that free to be honest, or even aware, because most of our garbage is buried in the unconscious. So, it is absolutely essential that we find a spirituality that reaches to that hidden level. If not, nothing really changes.

Jesus is precisely giving us his full bodily humanity more than his spiritualized divinity!

For some few, the split is seemingly overcome in the person of Jesus; but for more and more people, union with the divine is first experienced through the Christ: in nature, in moments of pure love, silence, inner or outer music, with animals, a sense of awe, or some kind of "Brother Sun and Sister Moon" experience. Why? Because creation itself is the first incarnation of Christ, the primary and foundational "Bible" that revealed the path to God. The

do not find our own Center; it finds us. The body is in the soul. It is both the place of contact and the place of surrender.

Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ's historical manifestation in time.

The path to Christian perfection always runs across the collapse of our own moral efforts and self-established ideals.

He is giving us his full Jesus-Christ self—that wonderful symbiosis of divinity and humanity. But the vehicle, the medium, and the final message here are physical, edible, chewable—yes, digestible human flesh. Much of ancient religion portrayed God eating or sacrificing humans or animals, which were offered on the altars, but Jesus turned religion and history on their heads, inviting us to imagine that God would give himself as food for us!

Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else. This is why in John's Gospel, Jesus Christ makes the almost boastful statement "I am the Light of the world" (John 8:12). Jesus Christ is the amalgam of matter and spirit put together in one place, so we ourselves can put it together in all places, and enjoy things in their fullness. It can even enable us to see as God sees, if that is not expecting too

We were largely taught what to believe instead of how to believe.

At that level, organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive amounts of atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries (and in those who just keep up the external trappings of Christianity).

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage—as if it were God!

Only presence can know presence. And our real presence can know Real Presence.

We are not just humans having a God experience. The Eucharist tells us that, in some mysterious way, we are God having a human experience!

Trinity. It wasn't until the third century that Tertullian (150–240), sometimes called "the founder of Western Christian theology," first coined this word Trinity from the Latin trinitas, meaning "triad," or trinus, meaning "threefold." Again, the word itself is not found in the Bible; it took history awhile to find a proper word for this always-elusive "rubber band.

The feminine insight is a rediscovery of Jesus' spirit, a reemergence of a well-suppressed truth, an eventual political upheaval, a certain reform of our hearing of the Gospel and someday perhaps the very structures of the churches – and all proceeding from a "knowing" in the mother's womb, the exact place from which we received Christ for the first time.

When 'happiness' eludes us - as, eventually, it always will - we have the invitation to examine our programmed responses and to exercise our power to choose again.

Prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us.

Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful, and praising God until we ourselves are an act of praise.