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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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Richard Rohr
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: March 20
Catholic Priest
Motivational Speaker
Priest
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Death
Transformation
Ideas
Teachers
Doctrine
Failure
Relapse
Darkness
Doctrines
Teacher
Descent
Path
Primaries
Rather
Primary

More quotes by Richard Rohr

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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.
Richard Rohr
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Christ is bigger than the Earth planet. If tomorrow we discover life on another planet, the whole Jesus piece would not make sense anymore. If he did everything for just us on this planet he wouldn't be the savior of the world.
Richard Rohr
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Once you experience being loved when you are unworthy, being forgiven when you did something wrong, that moves you into non-dual thinking. You move from what I call meritocracy, quid pro quo thinking, to the huge ocean of grace, where you stop counting or calculating.
Richard Rohr
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Ancients knew that you need guidance, patronage and protection as you move from one place or state to another, whenever you cross a bridge. You had better know what you are doing when you leave one group or place to join another.
Richard Rohr
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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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Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.
Richard Rohr
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Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.
Richard Rohr
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Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.
Richard Rohr
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You do need some successes as a young person. They don't inflate the ego necessarily, they just give you identity and ego structure. But, don't construct your life around creating those. Or you will become narcissistic and ego-centric. That won't get you anywhere.
Richard Rohr
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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
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We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.
Richard Rohr
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God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.
Richard Rohr
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The most common one-liner in the Bible is, Do not be afraid. Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.
Richard Rohr
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Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate.
Richard Rohr
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Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.
Richard Rohr
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Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth.
Richard Rohr
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Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.
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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People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.
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