Quotes from Richard Rohr

I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others.

One would think that people who insist on being monotheistic would be the first in line to walk across the artificial boundaries created by nation states, class systems, cultures and even religions. But often they are the last!

Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.

Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.

Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.

every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.

People who've had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don't know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.

The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.

The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection—and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth.

Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will.

Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through!

Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.

When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves

The ego hates losing – even to God.

I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.

Let's state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway.

Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.

My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. but many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.

The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.

The fears that assault us are mostly simple anxieties about social skills, about intimacy, about likeableness, or about performance. We need not give emotional food or charge to these fears or become attached to them. We don't even have to shame ourselves for having these fears. Simply ask your fears, "What are you trying to teach me?" Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for "False Evidence Appearing Real." From Everything Belongs, p. 143

In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.