Quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr

What, then, does it mean to follow Jesus? I believe that we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering, to help us see how we ourselves have been "bitten" by hatred and violence, and to know that God's heart has always been softened toward us.

Don't expect or demand from groups what they usually cannot give. Doing so will make you needlessly angry and reactionary. They must and will be concerned with identity, boundaries, self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, and self-congratulation. This is their nature and purpose.

The biblical symbol of the Universal and Eternal Christ standing at both ends of cosmic time was intended to assure us that the clear and full trajectory of the world we know is an unfolding of consciousness with "all creation groaning in this one great act of giving birth" (Romans 8:22).

God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.

If you realize that there is a further journey, you might do the warm-up act quite differently, which would better prepare you for what follows.

Whatever you trust to validate you and secure you is your real god, and the Gospel is saying, "Will the real God please stand up?

God's love is perfectly free. It is not coerced by any of our good actions, nor can we lose it because of our bad actions. We are stuck with it and cannot increase-or decrease-God's love for us by anything we do or don't do.

The self-same moment that we find God in ourselves, we also find ourselves inside God

The point is that, in some ways, many humans can identify with Mary more than they can with Jesus precisely because she was not God, but the archetype for our yes to God!

Just because you do not have the right word for God does not mean you are not having the right experience.

The common word for this inner abiding place of the Spirit, which is also a place of longing, has usually been the word soul. We have our soul already—we do not "get" it by any purification process

wisely put it years ago, " Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name."1