Richard Rohr Quotes
Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.
We do not handle suffering. Suffering handles us.
People who have been initiated "broke through in what felt like breaking down".
Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.
It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE – IS – HARD.
Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial.
It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.
When you get your, 'Who am I?', question right, all of your, 'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves
True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.
I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.
The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.
Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.
Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.
Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.
I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.
Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path to our own inner authority.
True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude.
With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.
Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.
The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It’s not the gathering of the saved.
Whatever good, true, or perfect things we can say about humanity or creation, we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power.
Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against.
How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?
Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.
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.
You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it toward it is, and then seeing the good as better.
If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things.
Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.
The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance, not one or the other, but always both at the same time.
Seventy times seven" is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards.
The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.
Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.
If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God.
