Richard Rohr Quotes & Sayings

Sacrificial religion was all exposed in Jesus' response to any mechanical or mercenary notion of religion, but we soon went right back to it in many Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant forms, because the old ego will always prefer an economy of merit and sacrifice to any economy of grace and unearned love, where we have no control. — Richard Rohr

If I'm going to continue to be any kind of spiritual teacher, I've got to go deeper myself. And so for me, [I am] preserving long periods of solitude, silence, prayer, journaling, study, writing. I don't turn on music or the TV unless I really need to. — Richard Rohr

God comes to us disguised as our life. — Richard Rohr

Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing. — Richard Rohr

Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text. — 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

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. — Richard Rohr

If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God! — Richard Rohr

Remember this: pure literalism always leads to a decrease in meaning. Mythology and sacred texts try to lead us and allow us to have the experience for ourselves. Through our experience we discover that encounter is not only possible but desirable. So often we struggle with experiencing our experiences. — Richard Rohr

Think of the cold Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, or the monk who tries to eliminate all humor in The Name of the Rose, or the frowning Koran burners of Florida. Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody. — Richard Rohr

Wisely put it years ago, " Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name."1 — Richard Rohr

most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are! — Richard Rohr

New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die. — Richard Rohr

Two thousand years after Jesus lived here, Christians still have a hard time accepting his upside-down world, in which we are expected to work for justice on behalf of others but not to demand or expect it for ourselves (Matthew 5:6,10-12). This is one of the hardest challenges of Jesus' message. It demands an expanded heart and mind. — Richard Rohr

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. — Richard Rohr

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. — Richard Rohr

Religious energy is in the dark questions, seldom in the answers. — Richard Rohr

It has been acceptable for some time in America to remain "wound identified" (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to "redeem the world," as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others. — Richard Rohr

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God. — Richard Rohr

Your false self is always that which is passing away. Your true self doesn't go up or down, it's constant - it's a rock. Once you learn how to live there, what others say about you, your failures or successes - these don't send you on a roller coaster ride down or up. It's really the only way to peace. There's no other way to be peaceful except in the true self. — Richard Rohr

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners. — Richard Rohr

Heartbreaks, disappointments and even our own weaknesses can serve as stepping-stones to the second half of life transformation. Failings are the foundation for growth. Those who have fallen, failed or 'gone down' are the only ones who understand 'up.' — 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

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

WHEN RELIGION CANNOT KNEEL Aristotle said democracy would only work in a culture already committed to virtue. There is no communal myth left that teaches us the essentially tragic nature of human life; there is no vision that proclaims the primacy of the common good; there is no transcendent image that makes human virtue a divine reflection. There is No One to reflect and No One to love and serve. I do not want to belong to a religion that cannot kneel. I do not want to live in a world where there is No One to adore. It is a lonely and labored world if I am its only center. My life is too short to discover wisdom on my own, to identify and properly name my own self-importance, to learn how to love if I have to start at zero. — Richard Rohr

If unconditional love, loyalty, and obedience are the tickets to an eternal life, then my black Labrador, Venus, will surely be there long before me, along with all the dear animals in nature who care for their young at great cost to themselves and have suffered so much at the hands of humans. — Richard Rohr

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

Advent is not about a sentimental waiting for the Baby Jesus, — Richard Rohr

To give, and not demand that others receive ... that is the crossover point to maturity ... — Richard Rohr

Faith is so rare-and religion so common-because no one wants to live between first base and second base. Faith is the in-between space where you're not sure you'll make it to second base. You've let go of one thing and haven't yet latched into another. Most of us choose the security of first base. — Richard Rohr

The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems. — Richard Rohr

It is the primary form of "dying to the self" that Jesus lived personally and the Buddha taught experientially. The growing consensus is that, whatever you call it, such calm, egoless seeing is invariably characteristic of people at the highest levels of doing and loving in all cultures and religions. — Richard Rohr

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said that what he resented in most Christians was what he perceived as a constant underlying resentment: (1) a denied resentment toward God for demanding sacrifice, (2) toward others for not appreciating our sacrifice, (3) sacrificing as much as we sacrifice, (4) and a resentment toward others for not having to do it! — Richard Rohr

Grace is found at the depths and in the death of everything. After these smaller deaths, we know that the only "deadly sin" is to swim on the surface of things, where we never see, find, or desire God and love. — Richard Rohr

"Christ" is bigger than the Earth planet. If tomorrow we discover life on another planet, the whole "Jesus" piece would not make sense anymore. If he did everything for just us on this planet he wouldn't be the savior of the "world." — Richard Rohr

Am I willing to walk into the wilds of my interior life without knowing what I'll find? — Richard Rohr

The people who know God well - the mystics, the hermits, those who risk everything to find God - always meet a lover, not a dictator. God is never found to be an abusive father or a tyrannical mother, but always a lover who is more than we dared hope for. How different than the "account manager" that most people seem to worship. God is a lover who receives and forgives everything. — Richard Rohr

Organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries. — Richard Rohr

People who think they can just do a non-stop flight to mystical, non-dual thinking, to get it out without going through the process, are usually not right. That's airy-fairy thinking. They have to wait until they are hurt themselves, or they are cheated, or lied to or betrayed, and they will see that their non-dual thinking is not tested, or truly a gift of the spirit. It's simply fuzzy thinking. — Richard Rohr

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. — Richard Rohr

The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines. — Richard Rohr

Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable. — Richard Rohr

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! — Richard Rohr

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God — 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

this preoccupation with order, control, — Richard Rohr

Throughout history, the Franciscan School has typically been a minority position inside of the Roman Catholic and larger Christian tradition, yet it has never been condemned or considered heretical - in fact, quite the opposite. It just emphasized different teachings of Jesus, new perspectives and behaviors, and focused on the full and final implications of the Incarnation of God in Christ. For Franciscans, the incarnation was not just about Jesus but was manifested everywhere once you learned how to see spiritually. As Francis said, "The whole world is our cloister"! — Richard Rohr

The very unfortunate result of this preoccupation with order, control, safety, pleasure, and certitude is that a high percentage of people never get to the contents of their own lives! — Richard Rohr

When 'happiness' eludes us - as, eventually, it always will - we have the invitation to examine our programmed responses and to exercise our power to choose again. — Richard Rohr

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. — Richard Rohr

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems. The Gospel exposes those lies in every culture: The American addiction to oil, war, and empire; the church's addiction to its own absolute exceptionalism; the poor person's addiction to powerlessness and victimhood; the white person's addiction to superiority; the wealthy person's addiction to entitlement. — Richard Rohr

The ego knows itself by comparison. — Richard Rohr

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity. — Richard Rohr

Our temptation now and always is not to trust in God but to trust in our faith tradition of trusting in God. — Richard Rohr

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

A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom. — Richard Rohr

The mystery of presence is that encounter wherein the self-disclosure of one evokes a deeper life in the other. There is nothing you need to "think" or understand to be present; it is all about giving and receiving right now, and it is not done in the mind. It is actually a transference and sharing of Being, and will be experienced as grace, gratuity and inner-groundedness. Thus there is always a great leap of inner authenticity that is associated with true mutual presence, because in being received graciously, we are able to receive ourselves at an ever-deeper level yet recognize that we are both part of something Greater itself. It gives one great happiness and deep joy. We really are socially contagious human beings, but we settle for "human doings." It is at the being level that life is most vitally transferred. — Richard Rohr

Life is all about practicing for heaven." p 101. — Richard Rohr

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

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

The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection - and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth. — Richard Rohr

God tries to first create a joyous yes inside of you, far more than any kind of no ... Just saying no is resentful dieting, whereas finding your deeper yes, and eating from that table, is always a spiritual banquet. — Richard Rohr

Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself. — Richard Rohr

You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus. — Richard Rohr

The most effective organizations, I am told, have both a "good boss" and a "bad boss," who work closely together. One holds us strongly, while the other speaks hard truth to us and sets clear goals and limits for us. — Richard Rohr

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

No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place. — Richard Rohr

There are two ways of being a prophet. One is to tell the enslaved that they can be free. It is the difficult path of Moses. The second is to tell those who think they are free that they are in fact enslaved. This is the even more difficult path of Jesus. — Richard Rohr

I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world. — Richard Rohr

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes. — Richard Rohr

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. — Richard Rohr

If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If — Richard Rohr

Until we walk with despair, and still have hope, we will not know that our hope was not just hope in ourselves, in our own successes, in our power to make a difference, in our image of what perfection should be. We need hope from a much deeper Source. We need a hope larger than ourselves.
Until we walk with personal issues of despair, we will never uncover the Real Hope on the other side of that despair. Until we allow the crash and crush of our images, we will never discover the Real Life beyond what only seems like death. Remember, death is an imaginary loss of an imaginary self, that is going to pass anyway.
This very journey is probably the heart of what Jesus came to reveal. — Richard Rohr

We must be honest here, and not defensive; the issues are now too grave and too urgent. Our inability to see our personal failures is paralleled by our inability to see our institutional and national sins too. It is the identical and same pattern of addiction and denial. Thank God that Pope John Paul II introduced into our vocabulary words like "structural sin" and "institutional evil." It was not even part of the conversation in most of Christian history up to now, as we exclusively concentrated on "personal" sins. The three sources of evil were traditionally called "the world, the flesh, and the devil." We so concentrated on the flesh that we let the world and "the devil" get off scot-free.8 — Richard Rohr

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. — Richard Rohr

The same powerful Scripture text that brings a loving person to even greater love will be mangled and misused by a fearful or egocentric person. This is surely what Jesus means when he talks about the one who has being given more and those who have not losing what little they have. — 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

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. — Richard Rohr

I think it's almost necessary for most people to have the freedom to pull back, and then re-enter at an adult level, where they are neither playing the victim nor creating victims, but just participating in calm, adult behavior. Because an awful lot of churches just aren't there at adult Christianity, this seems to be the norm anymore. — Richard Rohr

To believe in Jesus, is to believe that the historic person who lived on this earth more than 2000 years ago was the image of the invisible God. That's a huge leap of faith, but it is my leap of faith, it's the act of faith of the Christian community. — Richard Rohr

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. — Richard Rohr

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A "perfect" person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection. — Richard Rohr

Worship of Jesus is rather harmless and risk-free; actually following Jesus changes everything. — Richard Rohr

How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe. — Richard Rohr

Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff. — Richard Rohr

Loving God, allow me to be a sheep at least once in a while, and never let me forget that most of my life I have been a goat. — Richard Rohr

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

Jesus liberated us from religion. Jesus taught simple religious practices over major theorizing.... The only thoughts Jesus told us to police were our own: our own negative thoughts, our own violent thoughts, our own hateful thoughts-not other people's thoughts. — Richard Rohr

Once you experience being loved when you are unworthy, being forgiven when you did something wrong, that moves you into non-dual thinking. You move from what I call meritocracy, quid pro quo thinking, to the huge ocean of grace, where you stop counting or calculating. — Richard Rohr

It's a gift to joyfully recognize and accept our own smallness and ordinariness. Then you are free with nothing to live up to, nothing to prove, and nothing to protect. Such freedom is my best description of Christian maturity, because once you know that your "I" is great and one with God, you can ironically be quite content with a small and ordinary "I." No grandstanding is necessary. Any question of your own importance or dignity has already been resolved once and for all and forever. — Richard Rohr

Try to say that: "I don't know anything". We used to call it "tabula rasa" in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, "I want to see". — Richard Rohr

Spirituality is about being ready. All the spiritual disciplines of your life - prayer, study, meditation or ritual, religious vows - are there so you can break through to the eternal. Spirituality is about awakening the eyes, the ears, the heart so you can see what's always happening right in front of you. — Richard Rohr

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. — Richard Rohr

Perhaps the True Self
and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)
will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion. — Richard Rohr

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have - right now. — Richard Rohr

You cannot avoid sin or mistake anyway (Romans 5:12), but if you try too fervently, it often creates even worse problems. — Richard Rohr

Emotions are given to us by God, so that we can fully experience our experiences. The only problem with emotions is that we get addicted or attached to them. We take them as final or substantive. Emotions do have the ability to open you to consciousness, but then they tend to become the whole show. Most human thought is just obsessive, compulsive commentary. It's "repetitive and useless," as Eckart Tolle says. I would say the same of emotions.
Contemplation allows you to see (contemplata means "to see") this happening in yourself ...
Contemplation and silence nip the ego and its negatives in the bud by teaching you how to watch and guard your very thoughts and feelings - but from a place of love and not judgment. — Richard Rohr

John Duns Scotus, OFM, taught that the opposite of good was not bad but nonbeing itself. The opposite of truth was not falsity but nonbeing itself. And the opposite of unity was not multiplicity but nonbeing itself. All the opposites are all held and contained within pure being, even the finite and the infinite, matter and Spirit, male and female, etc., and this harmony between things is called beauty, which for some is a fourth transcendental itself. This worldview creates a very positive theology and anthropology based on original blessing instead of original sin. It also creates a philosophical basis for nondual thinking and the nature of evil. Evil is nonbeing and unconsciousness. Beauty is the fullness of being and full consciousness. — Richard Rohr

Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives. — Richard Rohr