Quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr

Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It's a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence. The full contemplative is not just aware of the Presence, but trusts, allows, and delights in it.

One place where I often see a positive focus and purpose is in the hardworking happiness of young mothers and fathers. Their new child becomes their one North Star, and they know very clearly why they are waking up each morning. This is the God Instinct, which we might just call the "need to adore." It is the need for one overarching focus, direction, and purpose in life, or what the Hebrew Scriptures describe as "one God before you" (Exodus 20:3).

Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it has largely contributed to the rise of atheism and the "practical atheism" that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries today. The God we've been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.

My starting point is that we're already there. We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is

It is the struggle with darkness and grief that educates the male soul.

God has no grandchildren. God only has children," as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often overreact. Or we conform, and often overconform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.

Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.

Before Jesus, it was all about earning and meriting and performing, and Paul knew that would eat us all alive—as it has.

Human strength is defined in asserting boundaries. God, it seems, is in the business of dissolving boundaries. So we enter into paradox—what's Three is one and what's One is three. We just can't resolve that, and so we confuse unity with uniformity.

It's not the idea that we hear, as much as the positive or negative energy behind it.

As I said, this Spirit has two jobs. First, she creates diversity, as exemplified in the metaphor of wind—just breathing out ever-new life in endlessly diverse forms. But then the Spirit has another job: that of the Great Connector—of all those very diverse things! All this pluriform life, the Spirit keeps in harmony and "mutual deference"267—"so there shall be one Christ, loving Himself," as Augustine daringly put it.268

If I can recognize that all suffering and crucifixion (divine, planetary, human, animal) is "one body" and will one day be transmuted into the "one body" of cosmic resurrection (Philippians 3:21), I can at least live without going crazy or being permanently depressed.