Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.

— Richard Rohr

Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.

— Richard Rohr

Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You’re trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

— Richard Rohr

Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

— Richard Rohr

Forgiveness becomes central to Jesus’ teaching, because to receive reality is always to “bear it,” to bear with reality for not meeting all of our needs. To accept reality is to forgive reality for being what it is, almost day by day and sometimes even hour by hour. Such a practice creates patient and humble people. Forgiveness reveals three goddesses simultaneously. When we forgive, we choose the goodness of the other over their faults, we experience God’s goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own capacity for goodness in a way that almost surprises us. We are finally in touch with a much Higher Power, and we slowly learn how to draw upon this Infinite Source.

— Richard Rohr

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

God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.

— Richard Rohr

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.

— Richard Rohr

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?

— Richard Rohr

I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.

— Richard Rohr