Richard Rohr Quotes - Page 10

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.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

Jesus praised faith and trust – even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall, or to fail, and not to fall apart.

You have to find some way to not become a cynical or negative person, a person who keeps walking around and opening your eyes in the outside world but inside you close down, a person who stops expecting tomorrow to be better than today.

I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.

God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.

The message of "falling" - failure, death, crucifixion, whatever you want to say - is not really that. Some sort of falling is really found in all the world's religions, just in different languages.

When I choose the title [for my book], which was my favorite title, I felt sure there was going to be a dozen books maybe with that name already because it's so obvious to me that that's the message. I was surprised it hasn't been the title of a single book. Well, there is a Shel Silverstein children's book called Falling Upwards. But no one has chosen Falling Upward as a title and I'm very happy it's right on the cover.

People wanted to me to describe more about what I call "the container," and then describe what the second half of life feels like.

We don't have much wisdom about the second half when things really open up and end up looking a lot more progressive. In my own Catholic church, for example, we're sort of circling the wagons today by thinking that more moral strictures, more exclusionary rules on this or that, that that's going to do for the first half of life. I don't think it really does.

What healthy religion is saying is that the real life is both now and later. You have to taste the Real first of all now. The constant pattern, however, is that most Christians either move both backwards (religion as nostalgia) or into the distant future (religion as carrot on the stick) and consistently avoid where everything really happens and matters—the present moment.

I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so.

It is so important to balance orthodoxy with orthopraxy.

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.

Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth.

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

We Catholics must admit that there is a constant temptation among us to avoid the lectionary and the Word of God for private and pious devotions that usually have little power to actually change us or call our ego assumptions into question.

Today we need whatever methods or help we can receive to allow the Christian message to take us to a deeper level of transformation.

If you stay in the mainstream of life, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we're in our middle years, when we've experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines.

We grow up as natural optimists as Americans. Catholic priests were so hopeful as we watched the Vatican II experience. Yet, it's a punch in the belly to see what has happened in the church and the world. Dualistic thinking seems to have taken over the church and our politics to a really neurotic degree.