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When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself.

Richard Rohr

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Richard Rohr
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: March 20
Catholic Priest
Motivational Speaker
Priest
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Well
First
Good
Life
Half
Sense
Wells
Firsts

More quotes by 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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Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.
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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The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.
Richard Rohr
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When you haven't found inner meaning, you will always substitute outer performance. It's the only way to fill that void, that sense of significance - that I am significant. So almost the degree of outer performance can, in many cases, mirror the lack of inner alignment.
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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A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.
Richard Rohr
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As to his gospel, Jesus Christ came into the world as the image of the invisible God to communicate to us that not only did we not need to be afraid of God, but that God is more for us than we are ourselves or one another. God's love is infinite, and unstoppable, and will win!
Richard Rohr
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If God is Trinity and Jesus is the face of God, then it is a benevolent universe. God is not someone to be afraid of, but is the Ground of Being and on our side.
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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God created us for love, for union, for forgiveness and compassion and, yet, that has not been our storyline. That has not been our history.
Richard Rohr
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I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.
Richard Rohr
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The same powerful Scripture text that brings a loving person to even greater love will be mangled and misused by a fearful or egocentric person. This is surely what Jesus means when he talks about the one who has being given more and those who have not losing what little they have.
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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THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky -journey. It's a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty or failure. On this journey the man learns to trust God more than he trusts a sense of right and wrong or his own sense of self-worth.
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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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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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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The true mystic is always both humble and compassionate, for she knows that she does not know.
Richard Rohr