Latest Richard Rohr Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• God, give me a good humiliation every day. It's good for the soul and it's good for the ego.

  Richard Rohr

  Giving, Soul, Ego

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• I think it's important to remember that by the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes, and no longer just in parts.

  Richard Rohr

  Thinking, Important, Half

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• Many people who attack me know so little of that larger Tradition, and end up being not very traditional at all. When you invoke the whole and great Tradition, you end up scaring people who call 1950 America "traditional" Christianity. It is just what they are used to in their one limited lifetime.

  Richard Rohr

  America, People, Littles

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• In the last years, I've been reading the Eastern fathers, the older mystical writings, a rich, deep, and truly traditional Christianity which most Western Christians know almost nothing about. It is very mystical and prayer centered Christianity, with a strong social conscience.

  Richard Rohr

  Christian, Strong, Prayer

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• G.K. Chesterton, who was part of a Catholic conservatism that was kind and loving, not reactionary or hateful, said "We're all in the same boat in a stormy sea and we owe each other a terrible loyalty." I think that's profoundly true, yet it's difficult to have civil dialogue right now with other Christians, so how can we possibly talk to "all the nations"?

  Richard Rohr

  Christian, Loyalty, Thinking

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• I'm not trying to make political statements ,but theological statements. How can religion get itself so identified with one political party, exclusionary world views, or with "pelvic morality" as the defining issues of the Gospel? Jesus surely didn't. Jesus said to "preach the gospel to all nations", which means we do not just talk to ourselves.

  Richard Rohr

  Jesus, Party, Mean

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• It seems we are suffering from a very narrow and self serving reading of the Gospel right now.

  Richard Rohr

  Reading, Self, Suffering

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• Many people I know who are doing truly helpful and healing ministry find their primary support from a couple of enlightened friends, and only secondarily, if at all, from the larger organizations.

  Richard Rohr

  Couple, Healing, Organization

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• To keep the middle coming back, you can't say some radically conservative or radically progressive things. That's been the bane of organized religion. It makes me wonder if Jesus' first definition of the church as "two or three gathered in my name" is not still the best way.

  Richard Rohr

  Jesus, Names, Two

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• If you're the head of the organization that has to pay salaries, bills and keep the money coming, you have to be concerned with pleasing the middle. I find it means you have to dumb down your message to something less radical than the gospel. It can't be the real gospel. It has to be "churchiness" that pleases everyone, so they come back next Sunday and keep putting money in the collection plate. I don't mean that in a cynical way. I just think it's what happens.

  Richard Rohr

  Real, Mean, Sunday

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• After 32 years as a priest , I think its fair to say that most institutional churches are very limited in addressing higher levels of spiritual consciousness.

  Richard Rohr

  Spiritual, Thinking, Years

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• If you stay in the mainstream of life, in other words, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we're in our middle years, when we've experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines. Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate. In other words, you hold onto your values, but you do it much more inclusively, humbly and in an open ended way. Suffering takes you there.

  Richard Rohr

  Years, Knowing, Abuse

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• We don't have much wisdom about the second half when things really open up and end up looking a lot more progressive. In my own Catholic church, for example, we're sort of circling the wagons today by thinking that more moral strictures, more exclusionary rules on this or that, that that's going to do for the first half of life. I don't think it really does.

  Richard Rohr

  Thinking, Catholic, Church

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself. Most of our mainline Christian denominations, in my opinion, don't do the first or second halves very well. We don't really give people a good container, we give them a bunch of legalisms.

  Richard Rohr

  Christian, People, Giving

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• What I wish I had said in the book [Falling Upward] is that part of the attraction of conservative religions, such as Mormonism, Mennonite, Amish, groups we would consider very traditional, is that they actually do the first half of life very well. They are often very happy people.

  Richard Rohr

  Book, Fall, People

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• People wanted to me to describe more about what I call "the container," and then describe what the second half of life feels like.

  Richard Rohr

  People, Half, Feels

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• When I choose the title [for my book], which was my favorite title, I felt sure there was going to be a dozen books maybe with that name already because it's so obvious to me that that's the message. I was surprised it hasn't been the title of a single book. Well, there is a Shel Silverstein children's book called Falling Upwards. But no one has chosen Falling Upward as a title and I'm very happy it's right on the cover.

  Richard Rohr

  Children, Book, Fall

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• Nature religions, for example, speak of summer, fall, winter, and spring. They see the downward path as the necessary prelude to any kind of upward path again. Our vocabulary is different. We Christians speak of the death and resurrection of Jesus. But unfortunately, we've projected it all onto Jesus and it didn't become a life agenda for the rest of us.

  Richard Rohr

  Summer, Christian, Jesus

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• The message of "falling" - failure, death, crucifixion, whatever you want to say - is not really that. Some sort of falling is really found in all the world's religions, just in different languages.

  Richard Rohr

  Fall, Want, Messages

  Source: rccapilgrims.ning.com

• There has to be a womp on the side of the head that defeats and undercuts this game of performance. It has to fall apart. Now unfortunately, that very often does not happen until what I call the second half of life, when there's been enough death in the family and you start experiencing your own physical deterioration.

  Richard Rohr

  Fall, Games, Sides

• People will often, almost always, prefer a male God. A male image of God gives them this sense of security, safety, order, no nonsense. So that's where their psyche is at. Probably it's something that they've got to go through. Not that there isn't a need for order in the world, but the mystical level seems to be the mature level of religion, and there the question is not order but union - divine union. And so, without some integration of the feminine, usually you never get to the mystical level.

  Richard Rohr

  Order, People, Safety

• When you haven't found inner meaning, you will always substitute outer performance. It's the only way to fill that void, that sense of significance - that I am significant. So almost the degree of outer performance can, in many cases, mirror the lack of inner alignment.

  Richard Rohr

  Mirrors, Way, Void

• If you work with such people almost on the level of spiritual direction, you see that they are people who prefer a world view of order and even punitiveness. And for some reason, there's a feeling that the male psyche is going to give that to them. And if that's your view of religion, which it is for many people, if they've never come to the mystical level, religion is for social order and to maintain social order.

  Richard Rohr

  Spiritual, Views, Order

• When you look at the dominance of Notre Dame, the love of Mary in almost every European country, psychologically, had to come from this recognition of the feminine mediating divine love. And for many people in history, it was clearly the preferred way because women raised most people, not men, so their first experience of unconditional love, of touch, of caring, of nurturing very often came from a woman - that got easily transferred to Mary.

  Richard Rohr

  Country, Caring, Unconditional Love

• One time, a Protestant minister said, "We made Jesus blonde haired and blue eyed and very cute. We made Jesus somehow a much more feminine figure." And there's probably truth to that.

  Richard Rohr

  Cute, Jesus, Blue