Quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr

All great spirituality is somehow about letting go.

The end is already planted in us at the beginning, and it gnaws away at us until we get there freely and consciously.

I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the "integration of the negative." Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus's revolutionary Good News, Paul's deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare lived out with such simple elegance.

Time is exactly what we do not have. What decreases in a culture of affluence is precisely and strangely time—along with wisdom and friendship. These are the very things that the human heart was created for, that the human heart feeds on and lives for. No wonder we are producing so many depressed, unhealthy and even violent people, while also leaving a huge carbon footprint on this poor planet.

The good news is that there is a guide, a kind of medical advocate, an inner compass—and it resides within each of us.

As Jaroslav Pelikan so 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

Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it. This is perhaps our major stumbling stone

The joyful acceptance of a limited world, of which I am only a small moment and limited part—this is probably the clearest indication of a man in his fullness.

This Holy Spirit guiding all of us from home and toward home is also described in John's Gospel as an "advocate" ("a defense attorney," as paraclete literally means, John 14:16), who will "teach us" and "remind us," as if some part of us already knew but still needed an inner buzz or alarm clock to wake us up.

We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone.

If you want to be important, serve others. And if you want to be at the top, then slave to help everyone else. The

If Christ and Jesus are the archetypes of what God is doing, Mary is the archetype of how to receive what God is doing and hand it on to others.