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Once God and grace move us to the second half of life, religion becomes a mystical matter, rather than a moral matter.

Richard Rohr

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Richard Rohr
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: March 20
Catholic Priest
Motivational Speaker
Priest
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Life
Becomes
Grace
Moral
Rather
Half
Religion
Mystical
Moving
Second
Matter
Move

More quotes by Richard Rohr

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The Gospel gives human suffering deep, personal, and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by connecting us to the very pain of God.
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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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.
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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.
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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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Your heart has to be prepared ahead of time through faith and prayer and grace and mercy and love and forgiveness so you can keep your heart open in hell, when hell happens.
Richard Rohr
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You cannot heal what you cannot acknowledge.
Richard Rohr
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The ego hates losing – even to God.
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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Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.
Richard Rohr
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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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Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.
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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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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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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If you stay in the mainstream of life, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we're in our middle years, when we've experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines.
Richard Rohr
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Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God
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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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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Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.
Richard Rohr