Quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr

If Christ represents the resurrected state, then Jesus represents the crucified/resurrecting path of getting there. If Christ is the source and goal, then Jesus is the path from that source toward the goal of divine unity with all things.

Humans like, need, and trust our mothers to give us gifts, to nurture us, and always to forgive us, which is what we want from God.

Great spiritual teachers learn to balance knowing with not knowing, as illustrated in this oft-quoted aphorism: It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. The true biblical notion of faith, which balances knowing with not knowing, is rather rare today, especially among many religious folks who think faith is being certain all the time--when the truth is the exact opposite. But we have little theology of darkness today.

All theological language is an approximation, offered tentatively in holy awe. That's the best human language can achieve. We can say, "It's like—it's similar to…," but we can never say, "It is…" because we are in the realm of beyond, of transcendence, of mystery.

Many of us were taught a vision of God as Tormentor when we were small, impressionable children, and it got deposited in the lowest part of our brain stems, like all traumatic injuries do.

The first-half-of-life container, nevertheless, is constructed through impulse controls; traditions; group symbols; family loyalties; basic respect for authority; civil and church laws; and a sense of the goodness, value, and special importance of your country, ethnicity, and religion (as for example, the Jews' sense of their "chosenness").

Jesus himself always went where the pain was. Wherever there was human suffering, Jesus was concerned about it now, and about its healing now.

To preach the Reign of God, dear brothers and sisters, we have to break with our dependency on a perfectible self.

you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.

Our faith became a competitive theology with various parochial theories of salvation, instead of a universal cosmology inside of which all can live with an inherent dignity.

salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

God protects us into and through death, just as the Father did with Jesus.