The Tears of Things Quotes

“We need to stop being surprised or shocked by reality and recognize that evil flourishes best when it is denied. Evil relies on being considered rational, necessary, and expedient by otherwise good people.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“The process of allowing and creating holy disorder is surely what Representative John Lewis called getting into “good trouble.” He was referring to the good and necessary trouble of civil disobedience in the pursuit of racial justice”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Peter Drucker was famous for saying, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In a similar way, I believe that culture eats religion for lunch. By that, I mean our beliefs are determined much more by our dominant ways of life and our surrounding cultural influences than by what we say we believe religiously.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Prophets move us beyond uncritical groupthink. Every group and every movement have their shadow sides. We need trained seers who are neither co-dependent on the religious system for their identity (such as clergy) nor seeking to make a good name for themselves.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Jesus, the ultimate prophet for many of us, said, “You received without charge, give without charge” (Matthew 10:8, jb). Giving without charge—and not expecting any pay—has been a gift of my Franciscan community and my solemn vow of poverty.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“You must do prophecy, the spreading of love and holiness, for free—or your message will not have the energy and power of the gospel.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Power distorts truth, so God plants and develops it at the edge, where the power-hungry least expect it. The truth will always be too much for everybody, but God seems content with a few getting the point in each era. The God of the prophets is very patient and very humble, although a cursory reading will not usually reveal that.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“jb), covering his face with his cloak, which is brilliant archetypal symbolism for partial knowledge of Mystery. Prophets who continue to lead (or end) with their rage have only half of the message, it seems. They have the anger but lack the compassion; mere moral positioning and ethical “answers” are not really the work of conversion. Smug people are not really holy people. These unfinished prophets often pass for the real deal because people confuse firebrands, liberals, zealots, and ideologues for those possessing deeper truth.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“How do we begin to form radical traditionalists and reformers for the church? How do we create schools for prophets? How do we train people to be so loving that they can be effective insider critics of religious institutions, or what we call the loyal opposition, without becoming negative or cynical themselves? Licensed and beloved critics are what we need! There must be a way to make room for this second most important of the charisms for the building up of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:28). Only then can we hope to move beyond competing denominationalism and, frankly, pride.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“We think it’s about returning to an original, unsullied state, when in reality the prophetic way is to pass through disorder to a new stage that does not eliminate or deny the tears of things but instead includes them at a new level. Divine perfection is precisely the ability to include imperfection! God forgives by including the mistake and letting go of the need to punish it. We can do the same.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Following his leading, I say, as it were, that you must go into Babylon (exile), and find a new kind of freedom there. Don’t believe those who tell you that you can grow while staying in full control. It is a lie. In all of our lives, deeper love has to do with giving up some measure of control. Jeremiah advises a giving up of control to a larger loving force. He even lets himself be a living pantomime of this state, living for some period with a rope and noose around his neck (Jeremiah 27:2). As all authentic initiation rites teach, you must die before you die—and then you will not be afraid of dying. Giving up control assumes there is someone to give control up to—someone I can trust to do an even better job.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Culture and systems are what create the large-scale evils that threaten us—such as poverty, war, and ecological devastation. Religion must address collective evil. Nothing will ever change if we merely convert, imprison, or judge “bad guys.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Only the whole narrative of any book of the Bible really deserves to be called inspired. The prophets do eventually arrive at the full picture, but if we do not teach and use such a spiritual or historical-critical approach to our reading of the Bible, we should not be surprised when more and more thinking people give up on Christianity and our willful ignorance about how literature works—which too often is what we substitute for faith.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Truth without love is not transformational truth. Truth from a cruel heart undoes its message”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Forgiveness of reality—including tragic reality—is the heart of the matter. All things cry for forgiveness in their imperfection, their incompleteness, their woundedness, their constant movement toward death. Mere rage or resentment will not change any of these realities. Tears often will, though: first by changing the one who weeps, and then by moving any who draw near to the weeping. Somehow, the prophets knew, the soul must weep to be a soul at all.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“the realization that all things have tears, and most things deserve tears, might even be defined as a form of salvation: from ourselves and from our illusions.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“In a Trinitarian worldview, all reality is relationship at its core.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Basically, this is the number one lesson: We can learn to love others by closely observing how God loves us and all of creation.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“One wonders what our theologies and worship would look like if we always began with an honest statement of our not knowing the real nature of holy mystery.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Like most of us, the prophets started not only with judgmentalism and anger but also with a superiority complex of placing themselves above others. Then, in various ways, that outlook falls apart over the course of their writings. They move from that anger and judgmentalism to a reordered awareness in which they become more like God: more patient like God, more forgiving like God, more loving like God.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“The philosopher Ken Wilber famously wrote that our path to maturity usually involves some form of “cleaning up,” “growing up,” “waking up,” and “showing up,” more or less in that order.[4”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“The only thing more dangerous and more common than narcissism is group narcissism.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Either God outgrows our present, limited understanding and we grow with God (as I wrote in my book Falling Upward),[3] or we regress due to our inability to love and trust what is happening. Then society reverts to legalism and formality until it ultimately disintegrates.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Besides being truth-tellers, they were radical change agents, messengers of divine revelation, teachers of a moral alternative, and deconstructors of every prevailing order.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“I wonder if one reason why we have so effectively wrecked and misinterpreted Jesus is that we needed to prove he was the Son of God or the Messiah or a miracle worker before we let him speak as a prophet.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Both light and love reveal not our separate superiority, but rather our radical sameness. That quality is, in fact, the way you can tell divine light from human glaring.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“, or possible variable in the drama of creation. All else must be “shaved” away as creating needless and useless complexity—which only confuses the soul and the mind.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“In fact, we are being taught that only love can handle the great truths.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“he says that humans are driven toward an archetypal energy of wholeness, which most of us cannot define precisely.[2”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“they had to learn to literally cry for all the world—plants, animals, fellow humans, earth itself—before they could continue on to manhood.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage