Quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr

Do not be shocked, but I suspect some priests' and ministers' moral failures are actually very helpful to their own "salvation" and necessary for their growing up.

I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

Jesus was killed in a collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths, caught between the demands of an empire and the religious establishment of his day.

The resolution of earthly embodiment and divinization is what I call incarnational mysticism. As has been said many times, there are finally only two subjects in all of literature and poetry: love and death. Only that which is limited and even dies grows in value and appreciation; it is the spiritual version of supply and demand. If we lived forever, they say, we would never take life seriously or learn to love what is. I think that is probably true.

The True Self always has something good to say. The False Self babbles on, largely about itself.

Religious energy is in the dark questions, seldom in the answers.

Contemplation is a spiritual practice that has the potential to heal, and connect us to the source of our being.

Reality, creation, nature itself, what I call the "the First Body of Christ," has no choice in the matter of necessary suffering. It lives the message without saying yes or no to it. It holds and resolves all the foundational forces, all the elementary principles and particles within itself—willingly it seems.

Religion, at its best, helps people to bring this foundational divine love into ever-increasing consciousness. In other words, it's more about waking up than about cleaning up.

Christ can hold together everything. In fact, Christ already does this; it is we who resist such wholeness, as if we enjoy our arguments and our divisions into parts.

Our unveiled gaze receives and reflects the brightness of God until we are gradually turned into the image that we reflect. —2 Corinthians 3:18

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. Just the Biblical notion of absolute forgiveness, once experienced, should be enough to make us trust and seek and love God.