Quotes from Richard Rohr

True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.

Without elders, much of our history has been formed by juniors reacting, overreacting, and protecting their own temporary privilege, with no deep-time vision like the Iroquois Nation, which considered, "What would be good for the next seven generations?" Compare that to the present "Tea Party" movement in America.

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.

It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude!

When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.

Francis's starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness

The game is over once we see clearly because evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary, or helpful.

Contemplation, sadly, helps you see your woundedness! That's why most people do not stay long with contemplative prayer, because it's not very glorious. It's a continual humiliation, realizing, "Oh my God, I did it again. I still don't know how to love!

This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of memory, not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.

Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don't have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You're trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Too often, we have substituted the messenger for the message. As a result, we spent a great deal of time worshiping the messenger and trying to get other people to do the same. Too often this obsession became a pious substitute for actually following what he taught—and he did ask us several times to follow him, and never once to worship him.

We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.

If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!

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

The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves—by themselves—and in themselves.

It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on.

Carl Jung, in his Collected Works (8, 784): "We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).

We've turned faith into a right to certitude when, in fact, this Trinitarian mystery is whispering quite the opposite: we have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality.

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

All Mature Spirituality Is About Letting Go

Each one of us has to find such a relationship in the suffering that we ourselves experience, be it the loss of a job or a home, the death of someone we love, rejection by our parents or our children, the breakdown of a marriage, institutional injustice, social violence or whatever. The causes of our personal suffering are many. And when we find the living, liberating answer that gives us meaning in the midst of suffering, we realize that it is a very personal answer.

Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything becomes an occasion for good and an occasion for God, and is thus at the heart of religion. The Center is everywhere.

In fact, the best of modern theology is revealing a strong "turn toward participation," as opposed to religion as mere observation, affirmation, moralism, or group belonging. There is nothing to join, only something to recognize, suffer, and enjoy as a participant.