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Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.

Richard Rohr

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Richard Rohr
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: March 20
Catholic Priest
Motivational Speaker
Priest
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Different
Judging
Comparing
Present
Analyzing
Prayer
Wholeness
Eyes
Competing
Looking
Contemplation
Eye
Receiving
Moment
Compare
Moments
Meant
Labeling

More quotes by Richard Rohr

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A person who can laugh and go with life does not demand to be in control, which is why the most controlling people may be sarcastic but lack an authentic sense of humor.
Richard Rohr
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God comes to us disguised as our life.
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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You cannot be naïve about evil. You cannot be naïve to the reality that there are human beings and human situations which have totally identified with the dark side of reality. They are malicious. Realism teaches you to put up appropriate boundaries so that people can't do any more evil than possible. But that doesn't mean you do evil back to them.
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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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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The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.
Richard Rohr
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You surrender to love you do not accomplish love by willpower.
Richard Rohr
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We grow up as natural optimists as Americans. Catholic priests were so hopeful as we watched the Vatican II experience. Yet, it's a punch in the belly to see what has happened in the church and the world. Dualistic thinking seems to have taken over the church and our politics to a really neurotic degree.
Richard Rohr
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Men and women are most alike at their most mature and soulful levels. Men and women are most different only at their most immature and merely physical levels.
Richard Rohr
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Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.
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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Religion has in fact outdone culture in dualistic thinking - we've become as violent, as hateful toward our enemies, damning them to hell and whatever else, that the world doesn't look to us for wisdom, because we're trapped in the dualistic mind, instead of the mind of Christ that we were supposed to have.
Richard Rohr
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The ego knows itself by comparison.
Richard Rohr
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every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.
Richard Rohr
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Pope Francis insists that mercy is at the very top of the Christian hierarchy of great truths, and everything falls apart whenever mercy is displaced by anything else.
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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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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It is only through the holes in our soul that we break out and God breaks through.
Richard Rohr
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I think most human beings are dualistic thinkers. It gets them through the day. It gives them a sense of superiority and security - that's what the ego wants.
Richard Rohr