From Wild Man to Wise Man Quotes

“There are two ways of being a prophet. One is to tell the enslaved that they can be free. It is the difficult path of Moses. The second is to tell those who think they are free that they are in fact enslaved. This is the even more difficult path of Jesus.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“Carl Jung, in his Collected Works (8, 784): “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“blinds them to anything and everything that falls outside that system. What they see and feel is only what feeds their addiction or what threatens it. To themselves they seem logical, even when they are being incoherent. To themselves they seem reasonable, even when they are being irrational. To themselves they seem moral, even when they are doing things that are destroying themselves and others. It is why many alcoholics are unkindly called “dry drunks” even after they stop drinking. The thinking patterns”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“Do not get rid of your hurts until you have learned all that they have to teach you.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“Before Jesus, it was all about earning and meriting and performing, and Paul knew that would eat us all alive—as it has.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“It’s not the idea that we hear, as much as the positive or negative energy behind it.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“It is the struggle with darkness and grief that educates the male soul.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“The spiritual man in mythology, in literature and in the great world religions has an excess of life, he knows he has it, makes no apology for it, and finally recognizes that he does not even need to protect or guard it. It is not for him. It is for others. His life is not his own. His life is not about him. It is about God.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“If people are to develop any deep spirituality today, and especially if men are to develop spiritually, they need to be liberated from self-serving worldviews.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“If you love those who love you, so what? Even the pagans do that!”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“For starters, a masculine spirituality would emphasize movement over stillness, action over theory, service to the world over religious discussions, speaking the truth over social niceties and doing justice instead of any self-serving “charity.” Without a complementary masculine, spirituality becomes overly feminine (which is really a false feminine!) and is characterized by too much inwardness, preoccupation with relationships, a morass of unclarified feeling and religion itself as a security blanket. This prevents a journey to anyplace new, and fosters a constant protecting of the old. It is no-risk religion, just the opposite of Abraham, Moses, Paul and Jesus. In my humble masculine opinion I believe much of the modern, sophisticated church is swirling in what I will describe as a kind of “neuter” religion. It is one of the main reasons that doers, movers, shakers and change agents have largely given up on church people and church groups. As one very effective woman said to me, “After a while you get tired of the in-house jargon that seems to go nowhere.” A neuter spirituality is the trap of those with lots of leisure, luxury and self-serving ideas. They have the option not to do, not to change, not to long and thirst for justice. It can take either a liberal or a conservative form, but in either case, it becomes an inoculation against any deep spiritual journey. That’s why I call it “neuter.” It generates no real sexual energy or life.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“Remember, we do not think ourselves into new ways of living, but we live ourselves into new ways of thinking. Jesus moves toward lifestyle solutions and not academic ones.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“Be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. —T.S. ELIOT, “East Coker” from the Four Quartets”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“I’m sure that this is equally true of men in the business world or any world. We all need someone with inner authority who can let us know we are OK, that what we are going through is normal, and what battles are worth fighting. Sometimes we just need to hear from someone who believes in us, but who believes in us enough also to challenge us. Strangely, in their presence, the assurance and self-confidence are there, almost by magic, and almost embarrassingly so. It is humbling and wonderful to be a spiritual son.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“Maybe even sadder is the willingness to give your whole life producing items of no social benefit, or even destructive, like slot machines, tawdry luxury goods or nuclear weapons. Is that what a man wants to do with his one single chance at life? Money is not just about paying bills, it must also be connected with making some contribution to life, others and history.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“he just tells him to “descend” from his power position, “go away and get rid of all your possessions.” Money is only the metaphor here; the real possession he has to get rid of is his ego.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“Holiness has to do with who we are in God, where we abide as a “self” with an utterly reconstituted sense of our own personhood.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“The joyful acceptance of a limited world, of which I am only a small moment and limited part—this is probably the clearest indication of a man in his fullness.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“in fact, that’s largely what it means to be loving. You can hold for them what they cannot yet hold. You can transform for them what they cannot yet transform. You do that by not returning their negativity and fear in kind, as most people will do.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“The concern was about getting the beginning right, and then life and eternity would take care of themselves. We have been preoccupied with getting the end right, for some reason.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“Many of the greatest, kindest and most effective men I have ever met were driven to their life’s task by an aching father hunger that they often did not recognize themselves. It led them to be good students to mentors, help other boys, befriend other men, to nurture themselves because they had not been nurtured. But most especially they sometimes learn to seek, to desire and to trust that God is that loving and compassionate Daddy they always wanted. And that’s exactly what Jesus told us was true in his favorite story that we call the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32).”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“No civilization has ever survived unless the elders saw it their duty to pass on gifts of Spirit to the young ones. Is it that we are selfish, or is it that we ourselves have never found the gift ourselves? I suspect it is largely the latter. I don’t think most people are terribly selfish. They just don’t know.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“No civilization has ever survived unless the elders saw it their duty to pass on gifts of Spirit to the young ones.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“As my father, Saint Francis, put it, “If you have once faced the great death, the second death can do you no harm.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“Anne Wilson Schaef”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“They look like the oppressors, but have no doubt they are really the oppressed.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“They are comfortable knowing, and they are comfortable not knowing. They can care and not care—without guilt or shame. They can act without success because they have named their fear of failure. They do not need to affirm or deny, judge or ignore. But they are free to do all of them with impunity. A saint is invincible.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“all healthy spirituality will always have a truly “sexual” character to it, a desire for re-union. Religion is always, in one sense or another, about making one out of two! Cheap religion is invariably about maintaining the two and keeping things separate and apart. Think about that and see if it is not true.”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality