Quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr

When you put the Gospels in someone's life who hasn't walked any journeys yet, who hasn't lost, suffered, longed, and thirsted for anything, they will use it for power - I promise you. For personal power, reputational power, economic power, because that's where the ego always goes. We will use God for our own purposes which is the ultimate idolatry. But if you have made the journey into powerless somehow, I will be happy to put the gospel in your hands.

We need to encounter the hero within and let him lead us on the adventure of our lives.

People who know who they are find it the easiest to know who they aren't.

There is no such thing as a nonpolitical Christianity. To refuse to critique the system or the status quo is to fully support it—which is a political act well disguised.

Cesar Milan, the "dog whisperer," says that dogs cannot be peaceful or teachable if they have no limits set to their freedom and their emotions. They are actually happier and at rest when they live within very clear limits and boundaries, with a "calm and assertive" master. My dog, Venus, is never happier and more teachable than when I am walking her, but on her leash. Could it be the same for humans at certain stages?

There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our blindness and lack of reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it.

Jesus said, "God is not a God of the dead but of the living for to him all people are alive!" (Luke 20:39). In my opinion, his aliveness made it so much easier for people to trust their own aliveness and thus relate to God, because like knows like. Some call it morphic resonance. C. S. Lewis, in giving one of his books the truly wonderful title Till We Have Faces, made this same evolutionary point.

Stop trying. Stop forcing reality. Learn the mystery of surrender and trust, and then it will be done unto you, through you, with you, in you, and, very often, in spite of you.

Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not eat such humiliations with regularity and make friends with … all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults…, you will certainly remain in the first half of life forever.

In The Odyssey, the stirring of longing and dissatisfaction is symbolized by the collapse of Troy and the inability of most of the Greeks to return home. It seems they had forgotten about home, had made home in a foreign land, or were not that determined to return home (which are all excellent descriptions of the typical detours or dead ends on the spiritual journey!).

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

What I am calling in this book an incarnational worldview is the profound recognition of the presence of the divine in literally "every thing" and "every one." It is the key to mental and spiritual health, as well as to a kind of basic contentment and happiness. An incarnational worldview is the only way we can reconcile our inner worlds with the outer one, unity with diversity, physical with spiritual, individual with corporate, and divine with human.