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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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Richard Rohr
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: March 20
Catholic Priest
Motivational Speaker
Priest
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Religions
Fingers
Moon
Understood
Point

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If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
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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.
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The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.
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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.
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Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.
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Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.
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You cannot heal what you cannot acknowledge.
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We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.
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If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.
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Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.
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A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.
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The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up.
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God comes to us disguised as our life.
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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
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The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.
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Let’s state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway.
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In my opinion, most organized religion does neither agentic service nor relational nurturance very well.
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If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach.
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The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection—and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth.
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Sacramental listening reminds us that current suffering isn't the end of the story. God loves us deeply, and the vision for the future is vaster and more magnificent than we could ever imagine. In these moments of profound human presence, we are awakened to the divine presence and see that the kingdom of God is coming and yet is already here.
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