Adam's Return Quotes

“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“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.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“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.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“We do not handle suffering. Suffering handles us.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“You can unlock spiritual things only from within.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Great people do not need to concoct an identity for themselves; they merely try to discover, uncover, and enjoy the identity they already have. As Francis said to us right before he died in 1226, “I have done what was mine to do. Now you must do what is yours to do.” Yet to just be yourself, who you really are, warts and all, feels like too little, a disappointment, a step backward into ordinariness. Most Christians write it off as a cheap humanistic cliché. It sounds much more exciting to pretend I am St. Francis than accepting that I am Richard and that that is all God expects me to be—and everything that God expects me to be. My destiny and his desire are already written in my genes, my upbringing, and my natural gifts. It is probably the most courageous thing you will ever do to accept that you are just yourself. It will take perfect faith, the blind yes of Mary, because it is the ongoing and same incarnation. Just like the word of God descending into one little whimpering child, in one small stable, in one moment, in one unimportant country, noticed by nobody. We call it the scandal of particularity. This, here, now, me always feels too small and specific to be a dwelling place for God! How could I be taken this seriously?”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Religion is best when it points beyond itself, like Isaiah or John the Baptist. It is worst when it gives you just enough of the forms to inoculate you against the substance, when it substitutes rituals for reality, the container for the contents, the wineskins for the ecstatic wine.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“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.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“People who have been initiated "broke through in what felt like breaking down".”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“If there is no list of names in eternity, we are burdened with making our own personal name day after day. Either we are made by another or we must be self-made. Then it is every man for himself, dog eat dog, as we vie with one another for a zero-sum dignity and importance. If you have it, then I don’t, or I will use you for my measuring stick. In either case, I am lost in comparison, envy, competition, and codependency. Spiritually: if you have it, I do too, and if I have it, you do too. Authentic spirituality is an experience of abundance and mutual flourishing instead of scarcity. Material gifts and ego gifts decrease with usage, whereas spiritual gifts actually increase with each use, in ourselves and in those around us.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“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.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“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.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“The way to transmute the pain of life is to reveal the wounded side of things, evil, even, and then place the wound inside of sacred space. The Bible is about naming, facing, and then forgiving the wounds of history.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“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, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation