Richard Rohr Quotes - Page 4

As to his gospel, Jesus Christ came into the world as the image of the invisible God to communicate to us that not only did we not need to be afraid of God, but that God is more for us than we are ourselves or one another. God's love is infinite, and unstoppable, and will win!

I am who I am in the eyes of God- nothing more and nothing less.

If our love of God does not directly influence, and even change, how we engage in the issues of our time on this earth, I wonder what good religion is.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody.

When we can see the image of God where we don't want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own.

It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.

Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here.

If you don't transform your suffering, you'll transmit it.

God comes to you disguised as your life.

Jesus is never upset at sinners; he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners.

Let’s state it clearly: 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.

Every viewpoint is a view from a point.

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.

Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.

It is only through the holes in our soul that we break out and God breaks through.

You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and a willingness to not know-and not even need to know. This ever widens and deepens your perspective. This is how you allow and encounter Mystery and move into the contemplative zone.

Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often that’s what we want - a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems.

You surrender to love; you do not accomplish love by willpower.

Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate.

In solitude, at last, we’re able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence

Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.

Men must learn how to grieve, or they are inevitably angry or controlling, and they don't even know why.

The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

The important thing is the willingness to give back the gift that is you, not the perfection of the gift itself. Can you feel the difference?

Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will.