Richard Rohr Quotes

If God is willing to be born in a barnyard, then expect him to be at work anywhere - bars, bedrooms, boardrooms, and brothels.

Everything we touch in our daily lives, including our body, is a miracle. By putting the kingdom of god in the right place, it shows us it is possible to live happily right here, right now.

I try to associate myself as just being myself - and being a person, an American citizen, going out there every day and just trying to be successful.

From my perspective, most of my life has been dealing with the day-to-day, kitchen-to-bedroom-to-living-room-to-garage life with people. Most people are just trying to figure out how to love the people in their world, to love their God and to deal with some of these questions about God.

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one.

God is still in the business of coming down to earth: to this cubicle, this email, this room, this house, this job, this hospital room, this car, this bed, this vacation. Any place can become Bethel, the house of God. Cleveland, maybe. Or the chair you're sitting in as you read these words.

We have the idea that God is going to do some exceptional thing- that He is preparing and equipping us for some extraordinary work in the future. But as we grow in His grace we find that God is glorifying Himself here and now, at this very moment. If we have God’s assurance behind us, the most amazing strength becomes ours, and we learn to sing, glorifying Him even in the ordinary days and ways of life.

Either all days are holy or none are.

I wouldn't even like to begin to define God - I have absolutely no idea. But what I feel, and what touches me, is a great spiritual power, which I don't even want to name. If I had to, I would say God, because I don't know any other.

Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless in the first waking moment of the day you learn to fling the door wide back and let God in, you will work on a wrong level all day; but swing the door wide open and pray to your Father in secret, and every public thing will be stamped with the presence of God.

You can find the sacred in the most ordinary of things.

The ordinary is the divine.

A vast space naturally raises in my thoughts the idea of an Almighty Being.

God goes to work with you and does the laundry with you too. There's no place that God is not.

If man had written the Gospels - say Shakespeare or Eugene O'Neill - the story of the gospel would have been drastically different. They would have placed the prince in halls and palaces and had him walking among the great. They would have had him surrounded by the important and significant of the time. Potentates and kings would have been His companions. But how sweetly common was the real God-man; though He had inhabited all eternity, He had come down and was subject to the rising and the setting of the sun.

This is the wonderful truth, my dear friends: the Word, which became flesh two thousand years ago, is present today in the Eucharist

The incarnation is “a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.

Be ordinary, but bring a quality of awareness to your ordinary life. Bring God to your ordinary life introduce God into your ordinary life. Sleep, eat, love, pray, meditate, but don’t think that you are making or doing something special—and then you will be special.

We know only that we are living in these bodies and have a vague idea, because we have heard it, and because our faith tells us so, that we possess souls. As to what good qualities there may be in our souls, or who dwells within them, or how precious they are, those are things which seldom consider and so we trouble little about carefully preserving the soul's beauty.

The idea is to find some bit of holiness in everything-food, sex, earning and spending money, having children, conversations with friends. Everything can be seen as a miracle, as part of God's plan. When we can truly see this, we nourish our souls.

By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.

On a specific day marked on the earth's calendar, and in a specific place on the earth's map, the Son of God came to the planet. It was love.

Spirituality doesn’t exist on another level different from ordinary life.

There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.

I had tried, as I thought as a nun, to open myself to God and God seemed totally uninterested in me. The heavens remained closed and opaque. I now realize, of course, that I had a very, very inadequate idea of God. I was expecting clouds to part, a little sort of whisper in my ear, and of course, that's not what God is. God is not another being; we are talking about something much more profound.