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

“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

“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

“Authentic Christianity must be an utter commitment to reality, as opposed to ritual, or it is not a commitment to God.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Lacrimae rerum”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“We need to stop being surprised or shocked by reality and recognize that evil flourishes best when it is denied.”
― 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

“If you quote or follow the prophets in their immature stages, you might end up eating your children (Jeremiah 19:9), firebombing the temple, and meeting a God who is mainly known for his wrath, vanity, divisiveness, pettiness, and petulance (Ezekiel 13). More likely, these verses depict our untransformed self”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Instead, we begin in a state of empathy with and for things and people and events, which just might be the opposite of judgmentalism. It is hard to be on the attack when you are weeping.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“As Isaiah put it, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20, jb).”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“The Christian religion has sought to achieve its own innocence rather than act in solidarity with suffering and sinners. This is a major point, I believe.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Rather than reading the Bible inside our own bubble, we must allow the Bible to read us.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“We must first honor the plank of order, next walk the plank that is always disorder, and only then fall into the ocean of infinite everything.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“True prophets will guide us into, hold us inside of, and then pull us through to the other side of what will always seem like disorder. The more you have bought into any kind of absolute and necessary order, the bigger a dose of disorder you will need. A rule follower, for example, might need to confront a situation where their rules just don’t work—and be honest about it.”
― 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

“The deep patterns and trajectory of creation become clearer and simpler over time, especially if you are listening through what many of us call contemplation or prayer. Think of prayer as an honest and continuous inner dialogue of the soul with the indwelling presence in all things. As the resurrected Christ breathed on His disciples and commanded them to receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22), it is our very own breath -- and God's too -- that we breathe on the dry bones of the world. [...] The outer world reveals the inner majesty, and the inner world displays the outer mystery, or what we might call full incarnation!”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“If we stay with our rage and resentment too long, we will righteously and unthinkingly pass on the hurt in ever new directions, and we injure our own souls in ways we don’t even recognize. This is killing our postmodern world.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Carl Yung [...] describes at least seven central alchemical phenomena that most of us experience as life does its work on us:

-conjunto: the combining of contrary ingredients
-solutio: a loss of one substance to create a new admixture
-sublimatio: refining lesser ingredients into higher ones
-coagulatio: turning something ephemeral into something concrete
-calcinatio: the hardening needed to coalesce into substance
-mortificatio: necessary dying for movement between stages
-putrefacio: changing even to the point of appearing unattractive

These seven stages of alchemy are all spontaneous inner reactions to outer or conflicting events. They are profoundly psychological - and in my opinion, deeply theological, too. The secret is to hold the different ingredients together without seeking an answer, a goal, an outcome, a product, or a judgement. Let them all marinate together for as long as it takes to get to a free, accepting "yes".”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“When I was in seventh grade, an elderly Irish nun, Sister Clara, would tell us almost daily, with great emphasis, "You must cooperate with grace." [...] Grace is never induced by morality or piety or even law. It comes like the best and worst of our tears: usually uninvited, uncreated, unchosen, and unexpected, a pure creation out of nothing. From there, tears do their work, if we will just allow a little secret chemistry in the soul.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Most of us settle for a more defined position: fervent insiders, rebels against any belonging system, or too jaded to place our bet anywhere.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Pope John XXIII: “Why should the resources of human genius and the riches of the people turn more often to preparing arms…than to increasing the welfare of all classes of citizens and particularly of the poor?”[”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“They do not recognize how God has been patient and forgiving with them, nor have they learned how divine love operates. They still presume, as we all do in the absence of a vital spiritual experience, a rather universal reward-punishment logic.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“Can a pious pro-lifer ever admit that war, capital punishment, and social justice are also pro-life issues? Can the political left ever recognize its therapeutic bias, its individualism, its rejection of transcendence, its lack of support for the common good? Our small, myopic agendas have nullified the triumphant work of grace for too long.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

“wounders, not at all.”
― Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage