This page lists some of the all-time best Richard Rohr quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Religion & Christianity Quotes
- Christ & God Quotes
- Duality & Nonduality Quotes
- Prayer & Contemplation Quotes
- Transformation & Enlightenment Quotes
50+ Richard Rohr Quotes on God, Christ, Contemplation, & More
Richard Rohr Quotes on Religion & Christianity
“The first 2000 years of Christianity are going to be called ‘baby Christianity’. We’re just beginning to get the point of the revelation … In terms of geological time, the Bible has existed in the last nanosecond of time and was made highly printable only in the last 500 years … You can prove anything you want from a line in the Bible. Just pick and choose. Many of them contradict one another clearly … Jesus’ parables clearly do not allow for simply one interpretation.” — Richard Rohr
“Western Christianity was not for most people a transformational system, it was for most people a belonging system—my belonging system is better than your belonging system … Much of Christian history has been preoccupied with exclusion—who does not belong.” — Richard Rohr
“We settle for what I call ‘belief systems’ and ‘belonging systems’. When you want to unite people—which is what an empire wants, you want everybody to be conformed into one worldview—you really are threatened by any notion of inner freedom, or inner awareness, or consciousness. You would rather have people unconscious … What loses out when you emphasize belief systems and belonging systems is transformational systems … More and more people are moving beyond religion as mere external belief systems.” — Richard Rohr
“‘Faith’ meant comfortably not knowing, and we turned that around 180 degrees into being certain about everything … We have given Western Christians a kind of lust for answers—a kind of insistence on certitude, on closure, on resolution. So, we have people who aren’t very patient, who aren’t very compassionate, who aren’t very tolerant … Once you align the message of a spiritual teacher with Imperial thinking, there’s a whole bunch of questions you can’t ask anymore and you can only see what you’re told to look for—and if you weren’t told to look for it, you can’t see it.” — Richard Rohr
“We’ve made religion into a series of moral achievement contests, we’ve made religion into a bunch of hoops that you’ve got to jump and about a bunch of forms that you’ve got to bow down before—instead of leading people to know something to be true for themselves.” — Richard Rohr
“We substituted morality for mysticism. You can almost perfectly correlate: the more moralistic a Christian Church is, the less it has encountered the mystical … When you get the mystical first, you just don’t get preoccupied with: this much morality will achieve you this much heaven, this much morality will make God love you more, this much morality will achieve your own superior state. Moralism very much appeals to the ego.” — Richard Rohr
“The vast majority of Western Christians still think of God as ‘out there’ because they have not had any inner experience … Once you think you’ve got God in your pocket, that you understand the great mystery, religion always becomes arrogant and idolatrous—where we love our explanations of God more than actually falling in love with God, where God refuses to ever be an object of the intellect but is only known by those who enter into love and surrender.” — Richard Rohr
“The biggest single heresy of Western Christianity is that we individualize the whole message—we individualize sin and salvation … Everything lives from within and grows, and develops, and expands. And, when you squelch that inner life force, I think that’s the real meaning of ‘sin.’” — Richard Rohr
“The word ‘catholic’ means universal, and the irony is that Catholicism has not been universal up to now—it’s been very tribal, very ethnic … We clearly never got it—it was much more our identification with the group.” — Richard Rohr
“There’s not a Catholic way of breathing and an Anglican way of breathing, there’s not a Protestant way of breathing, there’s not an American way of breathing, there’s not an English way of breathing, there’s not a Buddhist way of breathing, there’s not a Hindu way of breathing, there’s not a Muslim way of breathing—we’re all doing this together.” — Richard Rohr
“We no longer need to see, nor should we see, the scientific mind as an enemy to religion … If you think the Christian religion is falling apart now, wait until we find life on another planet … Our little storyline is shot to hell.” — Richard Rohr
“The temptation of all religion is that we decide where the sacred is and where the sacred is not. Once you’re in control of that, you’re in control.” — Richard Rohr
“A civilization cannot survive if it is actively involved in hatred toward its own spirituality.” — Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes on Christ & God
“A ‘Christian’ is one who sees Christ everywhere. It’s not believing in dogmas, or going to church, or following some moral commandment … There’s a universal religion, a natural religion. It doesn’t depend on the Bible.” — Richard Rohr
“Christ is not Jesus’ last name … In the first 2000 years after what we believe is the incarnation of God in Christ, we largely were overwhelmed by Jesus and trying to figure out who he was … But, there’s been not a lot of recognition of the Christ.” — Richard Rohr
“We lost the massive truth. What we lost was the basis for a universal religion, a natural religion, an inclusive religion. We ended up with an overly sentimental personal religion which is what happens when you have Jesus without Christ.” — Richard Rohr
“Christ is a universal notion. Christ is everywhere … Christ is the ‘life principle’ of everything, and Jesus is the ‘death principle’. He came to reveal the only way you can come to this life is by incorporating death … When you can hold the life principle and the death principle together, Jesus and Christ, you’ve got the full mystery, the full revelation.” — Richard Rohr
“The Christ mystery is whenever matter and spirit are operating as one … Once you get into dividing, as if it’s up to you to decide where the Christ is and where the Christ isn’t, we lose every time.” — Richard Rohr
“We don’t want to teach people what to see, we want to teach people how to see—and when you teach people how to see, they will recognize the Christ … You don’t need to call it ‘Christ’ to have the recognition.” — Richard Rohr
“Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. Once the Christ presence is revealed in everything that lives, you can never be lonely again.” — Richard Rohr
“The second coming of Christ is you. The second coming of Christ is still happening—it’s not one event, it’s the rest of history.” — Richard Rohr
“You were chosen in Christ from the very beginning. The problem is solved—there’s not an apple problem to be solved later by an atonement theory … It’s a problem-solving technique to a problem that we created. It creates a father God who is pissed off at humanity and needs to be bought off to love us—which contradicts the nature of love.” — Richard Rohr
“We have to have a God who is dynamic, who is in movement, who is in relationship, who is participatory … God is relationship. God is communion.” — Richard Rohr
“If you don’t honor God everywhere, in all of creation and all of the species, you end up little by little honoring God nowhere.” — Richard Rohr
“The only thing worthy of being called ‘good news’ is that you are objectively the children of God—not subjectively, not psychologically, but ontologically … You are inherently, objectively, metaphysically, ontologically, by reason of your birth or conception, children of God with inherent dignity.” — Richard Rohr
“God already loved you before you were moral.” — Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes on Duality & Nonduality
“We’ve localized the human person not just in the top three inches of his body (the brain) but in the left part of the top three inches (left brain hemisphere).” — Richard Rohr
“How we in organized Christianity got in trouble is we largely, overwhelmingly read the words of Jesus—who was talking nondually—with a dualistic mind … Western Christianity largely became a PhD in dualistic thinking.” — Richard Rohr
“The dualistic mind of the West understood almost the entire gospel in terms of a win-lose paradigm. It’s called a ‘zero-sum game’—someone has to lose for you to win … Can you really allow your worldview to be changed to win-win? I don’t think it’s the gospel until you can.” — Richard Rohr
“With our dualistic minds, we reminded humanity of its humanity and Jesus of his divinity. That’s what the dualistic mind did to Western Christianity. It utterly split.” — Richard Rohr
“I don’t think I see any evidence that Jesus ever systematically taught what we would call ‘nondual thinking’, but he did exemplify it, and that’s even better.” — Richard Rohr
“The three persons of the trinity are three who know one another subject to subject, center to center—allowing total diversity and yet being in communion.” — Richard Rohr
“There’s a nondual way of reading reality where you don’t divide the field, where you don’t have to eliminate the negative, where you let reality get at you as it is—without judging it, analyzing it, critiquing it, explaining it, fixing it, controlling it, or even understanding it.” — Richard Rohr
“Everything belongs. It’s no longer up to you to decide who’s in and who’s out … You’re no longer in control of defining who’s in and who’s out because we’re all in … It’s one sacred ecosystem—it isn’t divided into the sacred and the secular.” — Richard Rohr
“You are not your own. You are inherently connected. You are inherently one.” — Richard Rohr
“You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego … When you’re out of the way, God can do God’s work.” — Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes on Prayer & Contemplation
“We won’t be able to move beyond the normal dualistic way of thinking unless we see how trapped we are in it, and that’s pretty much first-stage contemplation—it’s observing your stream of consciousness and suffering the necessary humiliation.” — Richard Rohr
“The normal mind that gets us through the day is rather dualistic and reads everything in terms of either/or, all/nothing, black/white … Once you move into either/or, oppositional thinking, you no longer have contemplation.” — Richard Rohr
“Once you need to prove that you’re right and someone else is wrong, that you’re the in-group and they’re the out-group, what you have is the dominance of ego. And, once the ego is center stage, there is no possibility of contemplation … It’s the death of the contemplative mind.” — Richard Rohr
“Contemplation is not saying prayers. Contemplation is a different set of eyes … You don’t say prayers as much as you become a prayer—you look out at life from a place of conscious union with God.” — Richard Rohr
“The mind—the educated Western mind even more so—cannot be present in the now … You can’t think the now … How you see is what you see. Most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are. We have not given Western civilization this kind of wisdom.” — Richard Rohr
“If you can learn a contemplative way of seeing the world, you’ll still say prayers and that’s good, but you’ll more become a prayer. It’s not what you’ll see, it’s how you’ll see everything—and that changes everything.” — Richard Rohr
“There’s a prayer previous to words. There’s a prayer beyond words.” — Richard Rohr
“I’m convinced the very word ‘prayer’ originally meant a different operating system.” — Richard Rohr
“It’s all one sacred universe. We’ve got a lot of unlearning to do, and that’s why we teach contemplation—because contemplation is mostly unlearning … Everything in the universe is relational … Nothing is autonomous, nothing is self-sufficient, nothing stands alone … Once you’re inside the enchanted universe where everything is granted subjectivity, you’re never lonely again.” — Richard Rohr
“The contemplative tradition has not been solidly taught for 400 years.” — Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes on Transformation & Enlightenment
“The salvation Jesus is talking about is present tense. He’s not saving someone from the hellfires later … He’s not talking about a reward-punishment system later. He’s talking about transformation now.” — Richard Rohr
“Our narrative was not a creation-based spirituality, it was a fall-redemption spirituality. Fall-redemption spirituality is what almost all of you were raised in. You create the problem, and then you say we have an answer to the problem—instead of teaching you how to be contemplative and see the sacred in everything, all the time, everywhere. That’s spiritual seeing.” — Richard Rohr
“Grace is always a humiliation for the ego. It’s just given, and it’s given to those people on the street just as much as you, and you’re not a bit better than they are.” — Richard Rohr
“All spiritual knowledge is not cognition. It’s recognition. You’re reknowing what you deeply already knew. What you deeply intuited, suspected, desired, hoped for—that’s the soul. The discovery of yourself and the discovery of God will eventually be parallel movements. You fall deeper into yourself. You fall deeper into God. You fall deeper into God, you have permission to fall deeper into yourself.” — Richard Rohr
“We really need a different set of eyes with which to read, or certainly understand, spiritual reality … Not to understand it literally but to understand it transformationally is the best way to understand a spiritual text.” — Richard Rohr
“The Christian meaning of ‘enlightenment’ has defined enlightenment in such a very individualistic, tiny way that really offered little gift to the world … It was all individual soul salvation.” — Richard Rohr
“The Christian meaning of enlightenment is there—it’s very parallel and consistent with awareness of who you are and how you see reality from this new ontological identity and the behaviors that proceed from that new pair of eyes.” — Richard Rohr
“Light is not something you see, it’s that by which you see everything else. So, to be ‘enlightened’ is to be able to see everything else with depth and with clarity.” — Richard Rohr
“The Eastern understanding of the resurrection is the liberation, the undoing, of hell—it doesn’t exist anymore.” — Richard Rohr
“The word ‘mystic’ simply means experiential knowledge, whereas what most of us have grown up with is book knowledge … What the mystical knowing does is it transforms your consciousness, your psyche. It doesn’t tell you what to see but how to see. You look out from a different pair of eyes.” — Richard Rohr
“The early mystic said, ‘God cannot not see God’s self in you. God cannot not love what God has created.’” — Richard Rohr
“Many of the mystics speak of your whole life being remembering in the darkness what you once experienced in the light.” — Richard Rohr
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