Eager To Love Richard Rohr Quotes

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.

Salvation is not a divine transaction that takes place because you are morally perfect, but much more it is an organic unfolding, a becoming who you already are, an inborn sympathy with and capacity for, the very One who created you.

But once we become practiced at a contemplative worldview, a “thisness” way of seeing, there is nothing trivial anymore and all is grace.

Francis’s starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness,

It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude!

If you look at the history of heretics who are condemned, their transgression is normally about issues of authority, priesthood, administration of sacraments, and “Who’s got the power?” I cannot think of anyone who was ever burned at the stake for not taking care of the widows and orphans, or for any issues of orthopraxy.

Thérèse (of Lisieux) told her sister, Celine, who was upset with her own faults, "If you are willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be a pleasant place of shelter for Jesus." If you observe yourself, you will see how hard it is to be "displeasing" to yourself, and that this is the initial emotional snag that sends you into terribly bad moods without even realizing the origins of these moods. So to resolve this common problem, both Francis and Thérèse teach you to let go of the very need to "think well of yourself" to begin with! That is your ego talking, not God, they would say. Only those who have surrendered their foundational egocentricity can do this, of course. Psychiatrist and writer Scott Peck once told me that Thérèse's quote was "sheer religious genius" because it made the usual posturing of religion well-nigh impossible.

Francis’s all-night prayer, “Who are you, O God, and who am I?” is probably a perfect prayer, because it is the most honest prayer we can offer.

There is no straight line to Goodness, to Love, or to God. And thank God, Grace is always retroactive.

Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything becomes an occasion for good and an occasion for God, and is thus at the heart of religion. The Center is everywhere.

greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection.

humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.

You never become humble except through fully accepting humiliations—usually many times.

Bonaventure’s theology is never about trying to placate a distant or angry God, earn forgiveness, or find some abstract theory of justification. He is all cosmic optimism and hope! Once it lost this kind of mysticism, Christianity became preoccupied with fear, unworthiness, and guilt much more than being included in—and delighting in—an all-pervasive plan that is already in place.

Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that. You cannot hold onto the old, all the while declaring that you want something new. The old will defy the new; The old will deny the new; The old will decry the new. There is only one way to bring in the new. You must make room for it.1 —NEALE DONALD WALSCH

There were clear statements in the New Testament about a cosmic meaning to Christ (Colossians 1, Ephesians 1, John 1, 1 John 1, and Hebrews 1:1–4; note all are in the first chapters!), and the schools of Paul and John were initially overwhelmed by this message. In the early Christian era, only some few Eastern Fathers (such as Origen of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor) cared to notice that the Christ was clearly something older, larger, and different than Jesus himself: They mystically saw that Jesus is the union of human and divine in space and time, and the Christ is the eternal union of matter and Spirit from the beginning of time. But the later centuries tended to lose this mystical element in favor of fast-food Christianity, almost always dualistic, for the normal parish believer. The

How you do anything is how you do everything.

Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

Do not be shocked, but I suspect some priests’ and ministers’ moral failures are actually very helpful to their own “salvation” and necessary for their growing up.

Faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart.”5

15:9). Big Truth is intended to deeply change the seer himself or herself, or it is not Big Truth—or truth at all. Some form of contemplative practice is the key to this larger seeing and this larger knowing.

Death is not a changing of worlds as most imagine, as much as the walls of this world infinitely expanding.

For some few, the split is seemingly overcome in the person of Jesus; but for more and more people, union with the divine is first experienced through the Christ: in nature, in moments of pure love, silence, inner or outer music, with animals, a sense of awe, or some kind of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon” experience. Why? Because creation itself is the first incarnation of Christ, the primary and foundational “Bible” that revealed the path to God. The

spirituality” which means that things are only found to be true in the doing of them.

In general, we taught that love and action were more important than intellect or speculative truth. Love is the highest category for the Franciscan School (the goal), and we believe that authentic love is not possible without true inner freedom of conscience,18 nor will love be real or tested unless we somehow live close to the disadvantaged (its method), who remind us about what is important.

I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the “integration of the negative.” Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus’s revolutionary Good News, Paul’s deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare lived out with such simple elegance.

This realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own.

In this negative frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is “unworthiness” itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity.

This needed work is indeed “spiritual warfare,” as the desert monks called it, since it takes conscious and sustained struggle to be aware of the shadow self—which only takes ever more subtle disguises the “holier” you get.

You are who you are in the eyes of God, nothing more and nothing less,” he often said.12

Francis of Assisi was a master of making room for the new and letting go of that which was tired or empty.

For Scotus, as for Bonaventure, the Trinity is the absolute beginning point—and ending point too. Outpouring Love is the inherent shape of the universe, and when we love, only then do we fully exist in this universe. We do not need to “understand” what is happening, or who God is, before we can live in love. The will to love precedes any need to fully understand what we are doing, the Franciscan School would say.

Thérèse, almost counter to reason, says: “Whoever is willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to herself, that person is a pleasant place of shelter for Jesus.

Francis “without having a specific feminist program…contributed to the feminizing of Christianity.”2 French historian André Vauchez, in his critical biography of Francis, adds that this integration of the feminine “constitutes a fundamental turning point in the history of Western spirituality.”3

Throughout history, the Franciscan School has typically been a minority position inside of the Roman Catholic and larger Christian tradition, yet it has never been condemned or considered heretical—in fact, quite the opposite. It just emphasized different teachings of Jesus, new perspectives and behaviors, and focused on the full and final implications of the Incarnation of God in Christ. For Franciscans, the incarnation was not just about Jesus but was manifested everywhere once you learned how to see spiritually. As Francis said, “The whole world is our cloister”!

The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that.

central to any authentic enlightenment.

Chapter Seven The Franciscan Genius: The Integration of the Negative You can show your love to others by not wishing that they should be better Christians.88 —Francis of Assisi We must bear patiently not being good…and not being thought good.89 —Francis of Assisi Yes, you read the quotes above correctly. The first quote was considered so untrue, so impossible that Francis would write such a thing, that for centuries we deleted the “not” in the text! In the second quote, the point seems to have largely been ignored or denied until the very same thing was taught by a later female doctor of the Church, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, in the nineteenth century. Maybe you would have automatically deleted the “nots” yourself, as I would have, which is why I italicized them.

There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our blindness and lack of reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it.

Great saints are both courageous and creative; they are “yes, and” or non-dual thinkers who never get trapped in the small world of “either-or” except in the ways of love and courage, where they are indeed all or nothing.

God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.

Both Catholics and Protestants have failed our people by mystifying the very notion of mysticism. The word itself has become relegated to a “misty” and distant realm that implies it is only available to very few and something not to be trusted, much less attractive or desirable. For me, the word “mysticism” simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, as opposed to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge.