Quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.

The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.

The fears that assault us are mostly simple anxieties about social skills, about intimacy, about likeableness, or about performance. We need not give emotional food or charge to these fears or become attached to them. We don't even have to shame ourselves for having these fears. Simply ask your fears, "What are you trying to teach me?" Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for "False Evidence Appearing Real." From Everything Belongs, p. 143

In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God.

Much of the Christian religion has largely become "holding on" instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

Once God and grace move us to the second half of life, religion becomes a mystical matter, rather than a moral matter.

Religion was made to order to "save the world," to use a phrase Christians use so much, but we really haven't been doing a good job of it for centuries. It's heartbreaking really.

It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.