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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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Richard Rohr
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: March 20
Catholic Priest
Motivational Speaker
Priest
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Read
Deaths
Lives
Headlines
Years
Invariably
Time
Mainstream
Life
Experienced
World
Stay
Middle
Suffering
Enters

More quotes by 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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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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The message of falling - failure, death, crucifixion, whatever you want to say - is not really that. Some sort of falling is really found in all the world's religions, just in different languages.
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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You surrender to love you do not accomplish love by willpower.
Richard Rohr
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You come to God not by being strong, but by being weak not by being right, but through your mistakes.
Richard Rohr
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Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.
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 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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God tries to first create a joyous yes inside of you, far more than any kind of no . . . Just saying no is resentful dieting, whereas finding your deeper yes, and eating from that table, is always a spiritual banquet.
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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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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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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Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.
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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I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.
Richard Rohr
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Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.
Richard Rohr
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God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.
Richard Rohr
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If you do not transform your wounds you will transmit them.
Richard Rohr
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Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.
Richard Rohr