Richard Rohr

You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.

Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.

The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It__ not the gathering of the saved.

Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.

I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in deep time, that is, Past, present, and future all at once.

With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.

True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude.

Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path to our own inner authority.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.

Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.

Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.

The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.

Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.

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.