Richard Rohr Quotes

“There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it’s enough.”

“The most common one-liner in the Bible is, “Do not be afraid.” Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.”

“Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through!”

“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.”

“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.”

“People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.”

“Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.”

“Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I’m afraid.”

“Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.”

“The ego hates losing – even to God.”

“Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.”

“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.”

“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”

“People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.”

“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. ”

“Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

“When you get your, ‘Who am I?‘, question right, all of your, ‘What should I do?’ questions tend to take care of themselves”

“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.”

“every time God forgives us, God is saying that God’s own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.”

“The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.”