Ronald Rolheiser Quotes & Sayings

We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly. In that sense, readying ourselves for death is really an ever-widening entry into life. — Ronald Rolheiser

The highest compliment we can give to God, our Creator, is to thoroughly enjoy the gift of life. One should never look a gift universe in the mouth! The best way to pay for a beautiful moment is to enjoy it. — Ronald Rolheiser

Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns of life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience, an overeating, not in terms of food but in terms of trying to drink in too much of life...And constancy of all three together account for the fact that we are so habitually self-absorbed by heartaches, headaches, and greed for experience that we rarely find the time and space to be in touch with the deeper movements inside of and around us. — Ronald Rolheiser

Loneliness is not, therefore, a quality inhering in an otherwise complete person. Rather it is so essential to our makeup that, viewed from a certain perspective, it can be seen to be the very constitutive element of our personality.17 — Ronald Rolheiser

Desire is the straw that stirs the drink. — Ronald Rolheiser

Without making any moral judgements whatsoever, one can say that self-indulgence and excessive self-preoccupation are the antithesis of genuine awareness. — Ronald Rolheiser

Our aspirations for love and knowledge are limitless, yet our capability of fulfilling these aspirations is always limited, no matter how good a situation we are in. For this reason we are, this side of heaven, always somewhat lonely. — Ronald Rolheiser

Becoming like Jesus is as much as about having a relaxed and joyful heart as it is about believing and doing the right thing, as much about proper energy as about proper truth. — Ronald Rolheiser

Resiliency is the key to love. — Ronald Rolheiser

before being born, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always, in some dark way, remembering that kiss and measuring everything it experiences in relation to that original sweetness. — Ronald Rolheiser

In a sense, all these stories make up one story, namely that of a people struggling to see the face of God, to pierce the riddle of loneliness, the mist of unreality, and to come to full meaning of life. Because it is a story of struggle, this story can shed much light on our own struggle to break out of the slavery of loneliness and to meet others and God in intimacy and love. — Ronald Rolheiser

In this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. Our deep longings are never really satisfied. What this means, among other things, is that we are not restful creatures who sometimes get restless, fulfilled people who sometimes are dissatisfied, serene people who sometimes experience disquiet. Rather, we are restless people who occasionally find rest, dissatisfied people who occasionally find fulfillment, and disquieted people who occasionally find serenity. We do not naturally default into rest, satisfaction, and quiet but into their opposite. — Ronald Rolheiser

You feel your own life - your heart, your mind, your body, your sexuality, the people and things you are connected to - and you spontaneously fill with the exclamation: "God, it feels great to be alive!" That's delight. — Ronald Rolheiser

The incarnation began with Jesus and it has never stopped ... God takes on flesh so that every home becomes a church, every child becomes the Christ-child, and all food and drink become a sacrament. God's many faces are now everywhere, in flesh, tempered and turned down, so that our human eyes can see him. — Ronald Rolheiser

Loneliness is simply the felt experience of our "Obediential Potency." In our loneliness, "in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable,"18 we experience our nature, learn the reason why God had made us, and are pushed out of ourselves in order to move toward that end. — Ronald Rolheiser

Loneliness is God's imprint in us, constantly telling us where we should be going. — Ronald Rolheiser

Above all, such an understanding of loneliness should help liberate us. It should teach us that loneliness is both a good and a natural force in our lives. — Ronald Rolheiser

Near the end of our lives, many of us struggle to move beyond the death of our dreams, beyond how we have been wounded and cheated, and beyond all the resentments that come with aging. — Ronald Rolheiser

It is no easy task to walk this earth and find peace. Inside of us, it would seem, something is at odds with the very rhythm of things and we are forever restless, dissatisfied, frustrated, and aching. We are so overcharged with desire that it is hard to come to simple rest. Desire is always stronger than satisfaction. — Ronald Rolheiser

Certain vocations, e.g., raising children, offer a perfect setting for living a contemplative life. They provide a desert for reflection, a real monastery. The mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is certainly monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centres of social life and from the centres of important power. She feels removed. Moreover, her constant contact with young children, the mildest of the mild, gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild and learn empathy and unselfishness. Perhaps more so even than the monk or the minister of the Gospel, she is forced, almost against her will, to mature. For years, while she is raising small children, her time is not her own, her own needs have to be put into second place, and every time she turns around some hand is reaching out demanding something. — Ronald Rolheiser

When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated, or enraged, it is in fact because our outside experience is so different from what we already hold dear inside. — Ronald Rolheiser

Thus we recognize goodness and truth outside of us precisely because they resonate with something that is already inside us. Things "touch our hearts" when they touch us here, and it is because we have already been touched and caressed that we seek for a soul mate, for someone to join us in this tender space. — Ronald Rolheiser

Every choice is a renunciation. Indeed. Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one's back on many others. — Ronald Rolheiser

We get ready for death by beginning to live life as we should have been living it all along. — Ronald Rolheiser

This is perhaps the greatest moral challenge Jesus left us: We all do pretty well in love when the persons we are loving are warm and gracious, but can we be gracious and mellow in the face of bitterness, jealousy, hatred, withdrawal? That's the litmus test of love. — Ronald Rolheiser

Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality. — Ronald Rolheiser

We all have this place, a place in the heart, where we hold all that is most precious and sacred to us. From that place our own kisses issue forth, as do our tears. It is the place we most guard from others, but the place where we would most want others to come into; the place where we are the most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of our compassion and the place of our rage. In that place we are holy. — Ronald Rolheiser

Gratitude is the root of all virtue — Ronald Rolheiser

The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land; and the quality of justice in the land will be judged by how the weakest and most vulnerable groups in society ('widows, orphans, and strangers') fared while you were alive. — Ronald Rolheiser

Sanctity has to do with gratitude. To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. — Ronald Rolheiser

A healthy soul must do two things for us. First, it must put some fire in our veins, keep us energized, vibrant, living with zest and full of hope as we sense that life is, ultimately beautiful and worth living ... Second, a healthy soul has to keep us fixed together. It has to continually give us a sense of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, and what sense there is in all of this. — Ronald Rolheiser

The resurrection tells us it is never too late. Every so often we will be surprised. We must believe that the stone will be rolled back, and we must be ready to poke out our timid heads, take off the linen bindings of death, and walk free for a time, breathing resurrection air. — Ronald Rolheiser

True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough. — Ronald Rolheiser

The canyons of our minds and hearts are so deep and so full of mystery that we try at all costs to avoid entering them deeply. We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened: frightened because we must make that journey alone; frightened because we know it will involve solitude and perseverance; and frightened because we are entering the unknown. Aloneness, suffering, perseverance, the unknown: All these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves. We are too frightened to travel inward. But we pay a price for that, a high one: superficiality and shallowness. So long as we avoid the painful journey inward, to the depth of our caverns, we live at the surface. — Ronald Rolheiser

Ultimately abortion takes place because there is something wrong within the culture, within the system, and not simply because this or that particular woman is seeking to end an unwanted pregnancy. — Ronald Rolheiser

Grace, not willpower, is what ultimately empowers us to live loving lives. Creativity, both in what spawns within the artist and the artifact, can be a vital source of that grace. — Ronald Rolheiser

Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one. — Ronald Rolheiser

But within ourselves we can experience a real difference between restlessness and solitude. What is that difference? It is the difference between living in freedom rather than compulsion; restfulness rather than restlessness; patience rather than impatience; inwardness rather than frenzied outwardness; altruism rather than greediness; authentic friendship rather than possessive clinging; and empathy rather than apathy.3 — Ronald Rolheiser

Charity is appeased when some rich person gives money to the poor while justice asks why one person can be that rich when so many are poor. — Ronald Rolheiser

Present injustices exist not so much because simple individuals are acting in bad faith or lacking in charity, but because huge, impersonal systems (that seem beyond the control of the individuals acting within them) disprivilege some even as they unduly privilege others. — Ronald Rolheiser

Evolution works through this principle: the survival of the fittest. One of the essential elements of Christian discipleship demands that we work for this principle: the survival of the weakest and the gentlest. — Ronald Rolheiser

Faith is not a question of basking in the certainty that there is a God and that God is taking care of us. Many of us are never granted this kind of assurance. Certitude is not the real substance of faith. Faith is a way of seeing things. — Ronald Rolheiser

The word baptism means derailment. Christ baptizes Peter on the rock when he tells him: "Because you confessed your love for me, your life is no longer your own. Before you said this, you fastened your belt and you walked wherever you liked. Now, others will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go." To submit to love is to be baptized, that is, to let one's life be forever interrupted. To not let one's life be interrupted is to say no to love — Ronald Rolheiser

All of us experience, to a greater or lesser extent, a loneliness that results from not having enough anchors, enough absolutes, and enough permanent roots to make us feel secure and stable in a world characterized by transience. — Ronald Rolheiser

Alienation results because human beings speak the same language only when they appear to each other as they really are, vulnerable, without impressively constructed towers. Vulnerability is that space within which human beings can truly meet each other and speak the same language. Sin and pride serve to destroy this space and drive us away from each other, leaving us to babble in our own language as we scatter to our respective corners of the earth. — Ronald Rolheiser

Anyone who deeply and honestly shares with us the struggles of her heart, her pains and fears, helps to make us more free. This is so because her story is really, in some way, our story. It is everyone's story. — Ronald Rolheiser

The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic. — Ronald Rolheiser

Spirituality is about what we do about the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros. — Ronald Rolheiser

When we are in touch with this memory and respect its sensitivities, then we are feeling our souls. At those times, faith, hope, and love will spring up in us and joy and tears will both flow through us pretty freely. We will be constantly stabbed by the innocence and beauty of children, and pain and gratitude will, alternately, bring us to our knees. That is what it means to be recollected, to inchoately remember, to feel the memory of God in us. That memory is what is both firing our energy and providing us a prism through which to see and understand. — Ronald Rolheiser

If listened to correctly, loneliness keeps telling us the purpose for which God made us. — Ronald Rolheiser

In Western culture, the joyous shouting of children often irritates us because it interferes with our depression. That is why we have invented a term, hyperactivity, so that we can, in good conscience, sedate the spontaneous joy in many of our children. — Ronald Rolheiser

There can be no final solution to our loneliness in this life. — Ronald Rolheiser

Being lonely does not mean that we are abnormal, love-starved, oversexed, or alienated. Perhaps all it means is that we are incurably human and sensitive to the fact that God made us for an ecstatic togetherness in a body with divine love and with all other persons of sincere will. — Ronald Rolheiser

There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . Augustine says: 'You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.' Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest. — Ronald Rolheiser

Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair. — Ronald Rolheiser

To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers, and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race, and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul ... because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves. — Ronald Rolheiser