Yes, and... Quotes

“You do not think yourself into a new way of living as much as you live your way into a new way of thinking.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Good powerlessness (because there is also a bad powerlessness) allows you to “fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). You stop holding yourself up, so you can be held. There, wonderfully, you are not in control and only God needs to be right. That is always the very special space of any positive powerlessness and vulnerability, but it is admittedly rare.

Faith can only happen in this very special threshold space. You don’t really do faith, it happens to you when you give up control and all the steering of your ship. Frankly, we often do it when we have no other choice. Faith hardly ever happens when we rush to judgment or seek too-quick resolution of anything. Thus you see why faith will invariably be a minority and suspect position. And you also see why the saints always said that faith is a gift. You fall into it more than ever fully choosing it, and only then do you know how grace, love, and God can sustain you and strengthen you at very deep levels.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“At times we have to step into God’s silence and patiently wait. We have to put out the fleece as Gideon did (Judges 6:37-40), and wait for the descent of the divine dew, or some kind of confirmation from God that we are on the right course. That is a good way to keep our own ego drive out of the way.


Yet there are other times when we need to go ahead and act on our own best intuitions and presume that God is guiding us and will guide us. But even then we must finally wait for the divine backup. Sometimes that is even the greater act of faith and courage, and takes even more patience. What if the divine dew does not fall? What do we do then?


When either waiting or moving forward is done out of a spirit of union and surrender, we can trust that God will make good out of it—even if we are mistaken! It is not about being correct, it is about being connected.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“To take the Scriptures seriously is not to take them literally. Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning. Most”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“With this access point, God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is Someone dancing with you and you no longer need to prove to anyone that you are right, nor are you afraid of making mistakes. Another word for that is faith.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of being in the world that is simple, nonviolent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established religion (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. We could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain throughout most of Christian history and still believe that Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior or continue, in good standing, to receive the sacraments. The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on earth is too great.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“I can be somewhat patient with people who think they have the truth. The problem for me is when they think they have the whole truth.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Jesus takes away from us—and from religion—the possibility of creating any class system or any punitive notion. Unfortunately, thus far, it has not worked very well.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“The point that must be remembered is that most of political and church history has been controlled and written by people on the right because they are normally the people in control. One of the few subversive texts in history, believe it or not, is the Bible. The Bible is a most extraordinary text because, again and again, it legitimates, not the people on the top, but invariably the people on the bottom or those who move toward those on the bottom—from Abraham to Moses to Jeremiah to Job to John the Baptist to Jesus. It has taken an amazing degree of denial and selective attention to miss this quite-obvious alternative pattern.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“The pattern is always the same: kings (power) versus prophets (truth).”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“For most people, their only citizenship is here, and this is the citizenship they are defending. Not “all of God’s people,” but just “my people, about which God cares most.” Whatever status quo benefits them is the full and final good. Pollsters know this is the way most people will vote. How foolish and how blind this is! Jesus showed no undue loyalty to his religion or to his country, but radically critiqued both of them whenever they demanded to be worshiped. I challenge you to find one patriotic statement from Jesus. (The one that most people wrongly use about “giving to Caesar” [Mark 12:17] is actually a total dismissal of Caesar’s rights in comparison to God’s rights.)”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Thomas Aquinas writes that evil must disguise itself as good and, until Christians start understanding that, their capacity for “discernment of spirits” (1 Corinthians 12:10) remains very minimal. They are easily duped and always misled by such devils.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“At a retreat I gave on the Scottish island of Iona, which was the center point for the diffusion of Celtic Christianity, attendees remarked how often the Celtic knot was found on crosses and gravestones, in manuscripts, and on jewelry. It was apparently the Celts’ artistic way of saying that all is connected, everything belongs, and all is one in God. They knew about ecosystems long before we did, but in an even larger way. All was held together inside of the divine knot. T.S. Eliot ends his famous Four Quartets by quoting Dame Julian and saying the same: And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire.48”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Simultaneous with the experience of the Holy as beyond and too much is another sense of fascination, allurement, and seduction, a being pulled into something very good and inviting and wonderful—the mysterium fascinosum. It’s a paradoxical experience. Otto writes that if you don’t have both, you don’t have the true or full experience of the Holy. I would agree, based on my experience.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“In the mysterium tremendum, God is ultimately far, ultimately beyond—too much, too much, too much (Isaiah 6:3). This mystery inspires fear and drawing back. Many people never get beyond this first half of the journey. If that is the only half of holiness you experience, you experience God as dread, as the one who has all the power, and in whose presence you are utterly powerless. Religion, at this initial stage, tends to become overwhelmed by a sense of sinfulness and separateness. The defining of sin and sin management become the very nature of religion and clergy move in to do the job.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good. It takes our whole lives for that to sink in, along with lots of trials and testing of divine love, because that’s not how human love operates.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Well,” you say, “it is in the Bible, and that makes it true and right.” That is why you have to use a whole different lens for interpreting any authoritative text. How you deal with sacred texts is how you deal with reality in general and how you deal with reality in general is how you deal with sacred texts—and both reality and all sacred texts are also fragmented and imperfect (see 1 Corinthians 13:12). It takes a certain level of human and spiritual maturity to interpret a Scripture. Vengeful and petty people find vengeful and hateful texts (and they are there, but some find them even when they are not there!). Loving and peaceful people will hold out until a text resounds deep within them (and there are plenty there!). In short, only love can handle big truth.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“What is God doing in the Scripture reading? With that question in mind, I want to give you an operative principle, which, I believe, had it been used in the last five hundred years, would have ensured a much more exciting and positive Christian history. If you are meditating on a Bible text, Hebrew or Christian, and if you see God operating at a lesser level than the best person you know, then that text is not authentic revelation. “God is love” (1 John 4:16), and no person you meet could possibly be more loving than the Source of love itself. It is as simple as that. You now have a foundational hermeneutic (interpretive key) for interpreting all of Scripture wisely.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Having read a sacred text, I would invite you to ponder these questions: 1. What is God doing here? 2. What does this say about who God is? 3. What does this say about how I can then relate to such a God?”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Our image of God, our de facto, operative image of God, lives in a symbiotic relationship with our soul and creates what we become. Loving and forgiving people have always encountered a loving and forgiving God. Cynical people are cynical about the very possibility of any coherent or loving Center to the universe, so why wouldn’t they become cynical themselves?”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“If God is Trinity and Jesus is the face of God, then it is a benevolent universe. God is not someone to be afraid of, but is the Ground of Being and on our side.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“When the Scriptures are used maturely, they proceed in this order: They confront us with a bigger picture than we are used to—of God’s kingdom, which has the potential to deconstruct our false and smaller kingdoms. They then have the power to convert us to an alternative worldview by proclamation, grace, and the sheer attraction of the good, the true, and the beautiful (not by shame, guilt, or fear, which are low-level motivations, but which operate more quickly and so churches often resort to them). They then console us and bring deep healing as they reconstruct us in a new place with a new mind and heart.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Do not let the word mystic scare you. It simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience. All spiritual traditions agree that such a movement is possible, desirable, and available to everyone. In fact, Jesus seems to say that this is the whole point! (See, for example, John 10:19–38.)”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“A great disappointment in our time is that organized religion itself has become more ideological than transformative.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“The political terms right and left came from the Estates General in France. On the left sat the ordinary people and, on the right, sat the nobility and the clergy. (What were the clergy doing over there?!) It’s interesting that now we use left and right as our basic political categories. The right normally protects continuity and the status quo. The left predictably looks for change and reform. There is a certain need for both or we have chaos.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“You do not think yourself into a new way of living as much as you live yourself into a new way of thinking.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Most seminaries, I am afraid, merely expose ministers to their own denomination’s conclusions and do not have time for much native, interfaith, or ecumenical education, which broadens the field from “my religion, which has the whole truth,” to “universal wisdom, which my religion teaches in this way.” If it is true, then it has to be true everywhere. There have been many generations of sincere seekers who’ve gone through the same human journey and there is plenty of collective and common wisdom to be had. It is often called the Perennial Tradition or the “perennial philosophy” because it keeps recurring in different religions and with different metaphors, but the foundational wisdom is usually the same. +Adapted from an unpublished talk at a conference in Assisi, Italy, May 2012.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“MORALISM INSTEAD OF MYSTICISM God always entices you through love. You were probably taught that God would love you if and when you changed. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change, is the experience of love and acceptance itself. This is the engine of change. If the mystics say that one way, they say it a thousand ways. But, because most common religion has not been at the mystical level, you’ve been given an inferior message—that God loves you when you change (moralism). It puts it all back on you, which is the opposite of being saved. Moralism leads you back to navelgazing and you can never succeed at that level. You are never holy enough, pure enough, refined enough, or loving enough. Whereas, when you fall into God’s mercy, when you fall into God’s great generosity, you find, seemingly from nowhere, this capacity to change. No one is more surprised than you are. You know it is a total gift.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“the goal in general is to be serious about the Scriptures. We have often substituted being literal with being serious and they are not the same! (Read that a second time, please.) The point I would like to make is that literalism does not take the text seriously at all! Pure literalism, in fact, avoids the real impact, the real message. Literalism is the lowest and least level of meaning in a spiritual text. Willful people use Scripture literally when it serves their purposes and they use it figuratively when it gets in the way of their cultural biases. Willing people let the Scriptures change them instead of using them to change others.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations