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When 'happiness' eludes us - as, eventually, it always will - we have the invitation to examine our programmed responses and to exercise our power to choose again.

Richard Rohr

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Richard Rohr
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: March 20
Catholic Priest
Motivational Speaker
Priest
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Choose
Programmed
Happiness
Responses
Power
Invitation
Always
Invitations
Examine
Eventually
Response
Eludes
Exercise
Elude

More quotes by Richard Rohr

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Contemplation is an alternative consciousness that refuses to identify with or feed what are only passing shows. It is the absolute opposite of addiction, consumerism or any egoic consciousness.
Richard Rohr
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The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.
Richard Rohr
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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
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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
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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
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Christianity is seen by more and more people as a negative message: anti gay, anti immigrant, anti abortion (as the only life issue), anti gay marriage, anti the Democratic party.
Richard Rohr
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Without transformation, you can assume you're at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.
Richard Rohr
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Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here.
Richard Rohr
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Someone has said, 'To be a saint is to have loved many things' —many things — the tree, the dog, the sky, the flowers, even the color of someone’s clothing. You see, when you love, you love, and love extends to everything all the time and everywhere.
Richard Rohr
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The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.
Richard Rohr
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We are just a little tiny flicker of a much larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God’s very self.
Richard Rohr
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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
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In solitude, at last, we’re able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence
Richard Rohr
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The journey never happens alone.
Richard Rohr
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Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.
Richard Rohr
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What some now call 'emerging Christianity' or 'the emerging church' is not something you join, establish, or invent. You just name it and then you see it everywhere- already in place! Such nongroup groups, the 'two or three' gathered in deep truth, create a whole new level of affiliation, dialogue, and friendship.
Richard Rohr
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Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.
Richard Rohr
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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
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To the degree you have experienced intimacy with God, you won’t be afraid of death because you’re experiencing the first tastes and promises of heaven in this world.
Richard Rohr
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You cannot heal what you cannot acknowledge.
Richard Rohr