Richard Rohr

If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.

The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.

The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance, not one or the other, but always both at the same time.

Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.

If we know our original blessing, we can easily handle our original sin. If we rest in a previous dignity, we can bear insults effortlessly. If you really know your name is on some eternal list, you can let go of the irritations on the small lists of time. Ultimate security allows you to suffer small insecurity without tremendous effort. If you are tethered at some center point, it is amazing how far out you can fly and not get lost.

His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does.

When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.

It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on.

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.

You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it toward it is, and then seeing the good as better.

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life.

If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things.

Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?

Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against.

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

Whatever good, true, or perfect things we can say about humanity or creation, we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power.