Quotes from Richard Rohr

The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.

In much of urban and Western civilization today, with no proper tragic sense of life, we try to believe that it is all upward and onward--and by ourselves. It works for so few, and it cannot serve us well in the long run--because it is not true. It is an inherently win-lose game, and more and more people find themselves on the losing side.

We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.

Perhaps the True Self--and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)--will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion.

The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them.

In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over.

Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different or better past.

THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky -journey. It's a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty or failure. On this journey the man learns to trust God more than he trusts a sense of right and wrong or his own sense of self-worth.

The hope is that science gives us objective truth; religion, however, gives us personal meaning or personal truth. They should not be seen as contraries.

Remember finally, that the ashes on your forehead are created from the burnt palms of last Palm Sunday. New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.

God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience.

Failure and suffering are the great equalizers and levelers among humans. Success is just the opposite. Communities and commitment can form around suffering much more than around how wonderful or superior we are.

The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey.

Your True Self is who you are, and always have been in God . . . The great surprise and irony is that you, or who you think you are, have nothing to do with its original creation or its demise. It's sort of disempowering and utterly empowering at the same time, isn't it? All you can do is nurture it.

If we know our original blessing, we can easily handle our original sin. If we rest in a previous dignity, we can bear insults effortlessly. If you really know your name is on some eternal list, you can let go of the irritations on the small lists of time. Ultimate security allows you to suffer small insecurity without tremendous effort. If you are tethered at some center point, it is amazing how far out you can fly and not get lost.

We have to let go of the passing names by which we have tried to name ourselves and become the "naked self before the naked God." That will always feel like dying, because we are so attached to our passing names and identities. Your bare, undecorated self is already and forever the beloved child of God. When you can rest there, you will begin to share in the universal Christ consciousness, the very "mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:16).

We moved from wondering to answering, which has not served us well at all.

At best, the theory of substitutionary atonement has inoculated us against the true effects of the Gospel, causing us to largely "thank" Jesus instead of honestly imitating him. At worst, it led us to see God as a cold, brutal figure, who demands acts of violence before God can love his own creation

grace is found at the depths and in the death of everything. After these smaller deaths, we know that the only "deadly sin" is to swim on the surface of things, where we never see, find, or desire God and love.

You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life.

If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.

God comes to you disguised as your life

Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.

If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community.