Richard Rohr Quotes

Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.
Richard Rohr
A mystic doesn’t say “I believe.” They say “I know.” A true mystic will ironically speak with that self-confidence but at the same time with a kind of humility. So when you see that combination of calm self-confidence, certitude, and humility all at the same time you have the basis for mysticism in general.
Richard Rohr
A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.
Richard Rohr
The ego hates losing – even to God.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.
Richard Rohr
The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
Men as a class appear to be "at risk," maybe even at high risk.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.
Richard Rohr
The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.
Richard Rohr
Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.
Richard Rohr
If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things.
Richard Rohr
When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.
Richard Rohr
His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?
Richard Rohr
We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.
Richard Rohr
Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.
Richard Rohr
The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It’s not the gathering of the saved.
Richard Rohr
Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.
Richard Rohr
I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in deep time, that is, Past, present, and future all at once.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.
Richard Rohr
Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path to our own inner authority.
Richard Rohr
Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.
Richard Rohr
I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.
Richard Rohr
I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.
Richard Rohr
The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.
Richard Rohr
In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.
Richard Rohr
True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.
Richard Rohr
Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing.
Richard Rohr
When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.
Richard Rohr
It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.
Richard Rohr
God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr
When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.
Richard Rohr
Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.
Richard Rohr
It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE – IS – HARD.
Richard Rohr
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.
Richard Rohr