“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them — while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.”
“‘Stinking thinking’ is the universal addiction. All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal — they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems. Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from this self and from cultural lies.
If the universal addiction is to our own pattern of thinking, which is invariably dualistic, the primary spiritual path must be some form of contemplative practice (once just called ‘prayer’) to break down this unhelpful binary system of either-or thinking and superiority thinking. ‘Prayer’ is changing your operating system!
— Richard Rohr, “Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps”
“We depend on nature not only for our physical survival. We also need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our minds. We got lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating - lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems. We have forgotten what rocks, plants and animals still know. We have forgotten how to be — to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is: here and now.”
“People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.”
Part of the reason we want to be God is that secretly we believe we have all the answers. Yet God is patient in calling us slowly to ever-greater wisdom. Usually God does this by making our self-constructed world fall apart. Our personal ‘salvation project’ must always show itself to be almost totally wrong; in fact, the refusal to allow this falling apart is what creates legalism and moralism in religions.
The pain of things falling apart is called suffering, and it is one of God’s ways to show us that life is always bigger than we imagine it to be. Faith is what sustains us through this suffering, and it allows us to discover that we can survive only be relying on a Much Greater Source.
God is always drawing us closer, blow by blow and bit by bit. And most of the time we do not even know it is happening.
— Richard Rohr, “On the Threshold of Transformation: Daily Meditations for Men”
“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
