Quotes from Richard Rohr

Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing "contemplation.

St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) taught that to work up to loving God, start by loving the very humblest and simplest things, and then move up from there.

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.

organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.

We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.

I believe contemplation shows us that nothing inside us is as bad as our hatred and denial of the bad. Hating and denying it only complicates our problems. All of life is grist for the mill. Paula D'Arcy puts it, "God comes to us disguised as our life." Everything belongs; God uses everything. There are no dead-ends. There is no wasted energy. Everything

We always become what we behold; the presence that we practice matters.

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A "perfect" person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.

God did not just start talking to us with the Bible or the church or the prophets. Do we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time? Did all history prior to our sacred texts provide no basis for truth or authority? Of course not. The radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it.

The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life.

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. There is no path toward love except by practicing love. War will always produce more war. Violence can never bring about true peace.

In this book I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That might just be the central message of how spiritual growth happens; yet nothing in us wants to believe it. I actually think it is the only workable meaning of any remaining notion of "original sin.

Shadowy material resides inside each one of us, but the man who is willing to face his own capacity for darkness will discover his deepest inner goodness and the presence of the divine within him. Some men never discover the divine presence within because they can't bring themselves to face their demons. Don't try to engineer this process or manufacture any angels. It will be done to you; just do not hate or fear the falling.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

A lot of us pray as if prayer is really twisting the arm of God or convincing God to do something. We think by saying more words we'll talk God into it. We think, "If I say it one more time, God will agree with me." That very attitude is an alienating attitude. It keeps us in the role of doing it "right" or often enough to convince an unready or unwilling God. Wrong, wrong, wrong! 19 minutes ago

When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting...you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic.

If your prayer is not enticing you outside your comfort zones, if your Christ is not an occasional "threat," you probably need to do some growing up and learning to love.

I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort—every day—is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received.

you are often most gifted to heal others precisely where you yourself were wounded, or wounded others.

The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.

What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change. It will think up a thousand other things to be concerned about or be moralistic about—anything rather than giving up "who I think I am" and "who I need to be to look good.

When you say you love God, you are saying you love everything. Immature religion becomes an excuse for not loving a whole bunch of things and reveals that you have not had an authentic God experience yet. Rigid religion and compulsive religiosity, all unloving religion, is a rather clear sign that you have not met God! Once you have had a unitive experience with God, reality, or even yourself, your life invariably shows two things: quiet confidence and joyous gratitude.

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now.