Kathleen > Kathleen's Quotes

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

“We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for “enlightenment at gunpoint” (death) instead of enjoying God’s banquet much earlier in life.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“Jesus himself always went where the pain was. Wherever there was human suffering, Jesus was concerned about it now, and about its healing now.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps

“It seems we are not that free to be honest, or even aware, because most of our garbage is buried in the unconscious. So it is absolutely essential that we find a spirituality that reaches to that hidden level. If not, nothing really changes.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

“And to be fully honest, I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps

“The body is like the ignored middle child in a family unit, and so now it is having its revenge through so much compulsive eating, sexuality, anorexia, and addiction, plus a wholesale disregard for the physical planet, animals, water, and healthy foods.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps