Quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr

God never intended most human beings to become philosophers or theologians, but God does want all humans to represent the very Sympathy and Empathy of God. And it's okay if it takes a while to get there.

In this negative frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is "unworthiness" itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity.

The Holy Spirit is that aspect of God that works largely from within and "secretly," at "the deepest levels of our desiring," as so many of the mystics have said.

Up to now, we have not been carrying history too well, because "there stood among us one we did not recognize," "one who came after me, because he existed before me" (John 1:26, 30). He came in mid-tone skin, from the underclass, a male body with a female soul, from an often hated religion, and living on the very cusp between East and West. No one owns him, and no one ever will.

More than anything else, the Spirit keeps us connected and safely inside an already existing flow, if we but allow it. We never "create" or earn the Spirit; we discover this inner abiding as we learn to draw upon our deepest inner life.

He did not come to change God's mind about us. It did not need changing. Jesus came to change our minds about God—and about ourselves—and about where goodness and evil really lie.

Christ is a good and simple metaphor for absolute wholeness, complete incarnation, and the integrity of creation. Jesus is the archetypal human just like us (Hebrews 4:15), who showed us what the Full Human might look like if we could fully live into it (Ephesians 4:12—16). Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.

Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it.

It is strange that when people have so much, they are so anxious about not having enough—to do, to see, to own, to fix, to control, to change.

As the old joke put it: It is forbidden to smoke while you are praying! But it is wonderful and meritorious to pray while you are smoking!

Unless and until we can enjoy this, so much of what passes for Christianity will amount to little more than well-disguised narcissism and self-referential politics. We see this phenomenon playing out in the de facto values of people who strongly identify as Christian. Often they are more racist, classist, and sexist than non-Christians. "Others can carry the burden and the pain of injustice, but not my group," they seem to say.

Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things.