Quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr

Christianity's true and unique story line has always been incarnation. If creation is "very good" (Genesis 1:31) at its very inception, how could such a divine agenda ever be undone by any human failure to fully cooperate? "Very good" sets us on a trajectory toward resurrection, it seems to me. God does not lose or fail. That is what it means to be God.

The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things. —Mechtild of Magdeburg (1212—1282)

Perhaps that's why faith is so rare and religion so widespread: because religion is very often a means to maintain our familiar image of God, even when it's pathological and destructive. We feel better with what we know, even when it does us in.

spirituality

Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society.

the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this. The transrational has the capacity to keep us inside an open system and a larger horizon so that the soul, the heart, and the mind do not close down inside of small and constricted space.

We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling but also, more important, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling

The whole of creation—not just Jesus—is the beloved community, the partner in the divine dance. Everything is the "child of God." No exceptions. When you think of it, what else could anything be? All creatures must in some way carry the divine DNA of their Creator.

No civilization has ever survived unless the elders saw it their duty to pass on gifts of Spirit to the young ones.

Walter Wink, a professor of biblical interpretation, calls it the mere "theological" worldview as opposed to the incarnational worldview, which is authentic Christianity.1 When all of you is there, you will know. When all of you is present, the banquet will begin.

No civilization has ever survived unless the elders saw it their duty to pass on gifts of Spirit to the young ones. Is it that we are selfish, or is it that we ourselves have never found the gift ourselves? I suspect it is largely the latter. I don't think most people are terribly selfish. They just don't know.

Faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart."5