Simplicity Quotes

“The sermons of pastors convert no one. Just consider how many sermons you've heard in your life. Circumstances convert people! You have to make your way to new circumstances so that reality can really get through to you, because that's where Jesus has hidden himself : in the human condition and even in the humiliation of human flesh. Christ always comes into the world on an ass, Christ always comes into the world as a beggar. We would so much like to have him enclosed in the Church and in our theology. But Good is always free.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“Individualism has taken away the credibility of the Gospel in the western world because we think we can seek our private freedom - independently of others. But genuine evangelization must move forward on two rails. We must simultaneously evangelize individuals, calling them to freedom, and evangelize institutions, nations, and systems, calling them to conversion. If you do the first, you'll be called a saint ; if you do the second, you'll be called a communist or a revolutionary. And for this reason most of us remain safely on the first side. Few of us are ready for full freedom in Christ. We want the freedom of Christ only so long as they don't take our "swine" away from us and we can live comfortably "among the tombs”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“The language of patriarchy is always a noble or macho language of patriotism and freedom. Men (and their female echoes) are always speaking it, but the amazing thing is that anyone is still willing to believe it. But fortunately the poor, the oppressed and marginalized, and especially women are beginning to trust their natural and truly religious instincts.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“In the Sermon on the Mount it’s quite clear that these are the three great barriers we have to overcome to understand Jesus and the Reign of God. But in Christianity we have always been concerned with ecclesiological questions, sacramental questions, sacerdotal questions, and, needless to say, sexual questions – questions that Jesus practically never bothered with.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“Those who don’t have anything to prove or protect can believe that they are loved as they are.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“In my opinion there are three primary things that we have to let go of. First is the compulsion to be successful. Second is the compulsion to be right – even, and especially, to be theologically right. That’s an ego trip, and because of this need churches have split in half, with both parties prisoners of their own egos. Finally there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“The left side of the brain seeks to understand and explain everything. It’s afraid of entering the “cloud of unknowing.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“When people get together in solidarity and unity, not out of power but out of powerlessness, then Christ is in their midst.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“experience as “mercy, within mercy, within mercy.”6 There’s always a lot of anxiety and insecurity in letting go of your current images of yourselves and your images of God.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“the little boy couldn’t feel and admit the pain until he was sufficiently sure that love was there.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“Perhaps that’s why faith is so rare and religion so widespread: because religion is very often a means to maintain our familiar image of God, even when it’s pathological and destructive. We feel better with what we know, even when it does us in.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“To preach the Reign of God, dear brothers and sisters, we have to break with our dependency on a perfectible self.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“In a materialistic society we have projected our sense of worth almost exclusively onto things. That is why it’s hard to rediscover our souls in ourselves.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“Women stuff' is the hidden energy behind almost all the justice issues. The movement toward nonviolence and disarmament, the movements that deal with homelessness and refugee problems, with the raping of the earth and its resources, with sexual and physical abuse issues, with the idolatry of profit and the corporation, and with the rejection of the poor will not move beyond the present impasse until the underlying issues of power, prestige, and possessions are exposed for the lie that they are.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go

“The feminine insight is a rediscovery of Jesus’ spirit, a reemergence of a well-suppressed truth, an eventual political upheaval, a certain reform of our hearing of the Gospel and someday perhaps the very structures of the churches – and all proceeding from a “knowing” in the mother’s womb, the exact place from which we received Christ for the first time.”
― Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go