Quotes from Richard Rohr

Yes, the natural world is the first and primary Bible. We have not honored it, so how could we, or would we, know how to honor and properly use the second Bible, when it was written.

It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.

Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often thatÂ's what we want - a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems.

Most Christian 'believers' tend to echo the cultural prejudices and worldviews of the dominant group in their country, with only a minority revealing any real transformation of attitudes or consciousness. It has been true of slavery and racism, classism and consumerism and issues of immigration and health care for the poor.

If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach.

The message of "falling" - failure, death, crucifixion, whatever you want to say - is not really that. Some sort of falling is really found in all the world's religions, just in different languages.

If you depend on being emotionally inspired or newly motivated, you will need a new fix almost every day.

Transformed people transform people.

If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.

Men must learn how to grieve, or they are inevitably angry or controlling, and they don't even know why.

Men and women are most alike at their most mature and soulful levels. Men and women are most different only at their most immature and merely physical levels.

We looked too long for God and truth through words alone. The fruit for humanity has been rather limited, it seems to me - especially when I observe every day the extraordinary amount of unhappy and angry people in well educated and 'religious' countries.

It's not correct to say Jesus is God. Now, don't run and report me to the bishop, all right? It's not correct to say that - Jesus is the union of the human and the divine. That's different.

Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth.

I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.

I see little difference in the attitudes of those who consider themselves Christian and those who are openly secular and agnostic. Most Christian citizenship appears to be clearly right here - on this little bit of very unreal estate.

In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us.

The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.

Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.

Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality. Mere inspiration can never do this.

It is so important to balance orthodoxy with orthopraxy.

One is struck in the study of saints, angels and gods by a pattern that seems quaint and harmless. Yet, it is so common that I know there must be a deeper meaning. There always seem to be guardians and spirits of doors, bridges, exits and entranceways.

Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.