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If you don't transform your suffering, you'll transmit it.

Richard Rohr

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Richard Rohr
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: March 20
Catholic Priest
Motivational Speaker
Priest
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Transmit
Transform
Suffering

More quotes by 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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Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.
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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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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What we know about God is important, but what we do with what we know about God is even more important.
Richard Rohr
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We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.
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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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.
Richard Rohr
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Spirituality is about being ready. All the spiritual disciplines of your life - prayer, study, meditation or ritual, religious vows - are there so you can break through to the eternal. Spirituality is about awakening the eyes, the ears, the heart so you can see what's always happening right in front of you.
Richard Rohr
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The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
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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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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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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To keep the middle coming back, you can't say some radically conservative or radically progressive things. That's been the bane of organized religion. It makes me wonder if Jesus' first definition of the church as two or three gathered in my name is not still the best way.
Richard Rohr
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If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.
Richard Rohr
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Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.
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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If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
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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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