Sacred Fire Quotes

“The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land; and the quality of justice in the land will be judged by how the weakest and most vulnerable groups in society (‘widows, orphans, and strangers’) fared while you were alive.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Evolution works through this principle: the survival of the fittest. One of the essential elements of Christian discipleship demands that we work for this principle: the survival of the weakest and the gentlest.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“One of our deepest struggles in life is dealing with the unconscious anxiety inside of us that pressures us to try to give ourselves significance and immortality. There is always the inchoate gnawing: do something to guarantee that something of your life will last. It is this propensity that tempts us to try to find meaning and significance through success and accumulation. But in the end it does not work, irrespective of how great our successes have been.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“As we age we need to forgive—forgive those who hurt us, forgive ourselves for our own mistakes, forgive life for having been unfair, and then forgive God for seemingly not having protected us—all of this so that we do not die bitter and angry, which is perhaps the greatest religious imperative of all.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Success has little to teach us during the second half of life.5 It continues to feel good, but now it is often more an obstacle to maturity than a positive stimulus toward it. Why? How can it be that something that once was healthy for us now is unhealthy? Because the feeling of success that earlier helped positively to ground our sense of self-worth becomes, at a later stage of life, when meaning needs to be grounded in something less ephemeral, more like a narcotic keeping us from health than a medicine aiding our health.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Nikos Kazantzakis shares a conversation he once had with an old monk named Father Makários. Sitting with the saintly old man, Kazantzakis asked him: “Do you still wrestle with the devil, Father Makários?” The old monk reflected for a while and then replied: “Not any longer, my child. I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength.… I wrestle with God.” “With God!” exclaimed the astonished young writer. “And you hope to win?” “I hope to lose, my child,” replied the old ascetic.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Thus, the invitation remains, despite its hazards: like Jesus, like Mary, and like everyone else who’s ever walked this planet, every adult woman or man will find herself or himself, this side of eternity, inside families, communities, churches, friendships, and work circles that are filled with tensions of every kind. The natural temptation, always, is to simply give back in kind, jealousy for jealousy, gossip for gossip, anger for anger. But the invitation that comes to us from the Gospels, the invitation to move from being a good person to becoming a great person, is the invitation to step forward and help carry and purify this tension, to help take it away by transforming it inside ourselves, by pondering as Mary pondered.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“the prodigal son, illustrating the first half of life, is very much caught up in the fiery energies of youth and is, metaphorically, struggling with the devil; the older brother, illustrating the second half of life, struggling instead with resentment, anger, and jealousy, is, metaphorically and in reality, wrestling with God.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Jesus does not just ask us to give in charity to the poor, he also asks us to work at correcting all the social, political, and economic structures that disadvantage the poor and help keep them poor.28”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“scripture scholars point out that in the Christian scriptures, one out of every ten lines deals directly with the physically poor and the challenge to respond to them. In the Gospel of Luke, that becomes every sixth line, and in the Epistle of James that challenge is there, in one form or another, in every fifth line.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“There comes a point in our lives when meaning must be predicated on something beyond the feeling we get from success and achievement.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Success has little to teach us during the second half of life.5 It continues to feel good, but now it is often more an obstacle to maturity than a positive stimulus toward it.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“In his gospel, we meet Jesus as an adult right on the first page and the first words out of Jesus’ mouth are a question: “What are you looking for?”6 That question remains throughout the rest of the gospel as an undergirding, suggesting that beneath everything else a certain search is forever going on.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Perhaps a change of names might help us more easily understand the distinction: liturgical, public prayer might more aptly be called priestly prayer, while private and devotional prayer might better be termed affective prayer. The former is our participation in the prayer of Christ, his praying as priest for the world; while the latter is our own prayer, done by ourselves or with others, within which we ask God from the depth of our own private faith to bless others and ourselves. This distinction can best be explained by highlighting what is contained in each.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Our relationship with God is the same. We need to “pray always” by doing everything out of that kind of awareness.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“The point is that we need to do everything within the context of a certain awareness, like a married man who goes on a business trip and who, in the midst of a demanding schedule of meetings and social engagements, is somehow always anchored in a certain consciousness that he has a spouse and children at home. Despite distance and various preoccupations, he knows that he is “married always.” That awareness, more than the occasional explicit phone call home, is what keeps him anchored in this most important relationship.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“All thoughts and feelings are valid material for prayer. Simply put: when you go to pray, lift up what is inside of you at that moment. If you are bored, lift up that boredom; if you are angry, lift up your anger; if you are sexually obsessed, lift up your sexual fantasies; if you are tired, lift up that tiredness; if you feel selfish, do not be afraid to let God see that. Jesus said that we must become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. One of the qualities in children to which this refers is precisely their honesty in showing their feelings. Children do not hide their selfishness, sulks, pouts, and tantrums.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Lack of real prayer makes for two kinds of antithesis to Mother Teresa: on the one hand, it makes for a wonderfully talented and energetic man or woman who is full of creative energy, but is also full of grandiosity and ego; or, on the other hand, it makes for a man or woman who feels completely empty and flat and cannot radiate any positive energy.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Generativity depends on prayer.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus prays a lot. And the lesson is not lost on his disciples. They sense that Jesus’ real depth and power are drawn from his prayer. They know that what makes him so special, so unlike any other religious figure, is that he is linked at some deep place to a power outside of this world. And they want this for themselves. That is why they approach him and ask him: “Lord, teach us to pray!”2”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“There are no perfect human communities, and so our task as mature adults, as elders, as Christian disciples, is to be that place where the amazement, the gossip, the negativity, and the scapegoating stop because, like water purifiers, we take it in, absorb it, transform it, and do not give it back in kind.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Human energy passes through us in the same way: either we act as a simple conduit, or we act as a filter.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“looking at his death, they understood this: he took in hatred, held it, transformed it, and gave back love; he took in bitterness, held it, transformed it, and gave back graciousness; he took in curses, held them, transformed them, and gave back blessings; and he took in murder, held it, transformed it, and gave back forgiveness. Jesus resisted the instinct to give back in kind, hatred for hatred, curses for curses, jealousy for jealousy, murder for murder. He held and transformed these things rather than simply retransmitting them. He took away the sins of the world by absorbing them, at great cost to himself.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“They would ritually do this by, among other things, draping the goat with a purple cloth and putting a crown of thorns on its head.18 The goat was then chased off to die in the desert. Its leaving the community was understood as taking the sin and tension away and the community was seen to be washed clean through its blood, its suffering, its death.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Until we reach a certain level of maturity, we form community largely around scapegoating; that is, we overcome our differences and tensions by focusing on someone or something about whom or which we share a common distancing, indignation, ridicule, anger, or jealousy. That is the anthropological function of gossip, and a very important one it is. We overcome our differences and tensions by scapegoating someone or something. That is why it is easier to form community against something rather than around something, and why it is easier to define ourselves more by what we are against than by what we are for.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“shedding light on Jesus’ death and on why his followers would, almost spontaneously, ascribe the image of sacrificial lamb to him, and that is the concept of the scapegoat.17 The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world is not just any lamb, he is the scapegoat lamb.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“Awe and wonder are the biblical antithesis of amazement.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“In offering this challenge, Jesus is offering the litmus test for maturity and Christian discipleship: Can you love an enemy? Can you forgive a murderer?15 He is also stretching us humanly and morally to a deep place that we cannot reach unless we ponder in the biblical sense; that is, unless, like Mary pondering, we take the raw and blind energies that flow through us and hold and carry and transform them before acting on them. Deep virtue demands of us that, like Mary standing under the cross, we transform hate-filled energy so as not to give it back in kind.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“ponder, biblically, is the opposite of this. We ponder when we do not let the energy of the crowd or of spontaneous emotion simply flow through us and become the basis for our actions. Instead, we hold and carry and transform that energy so as to not mindlessly retransmit it. And this capacity lies at the root of deeper maturity and deeper virtue. For”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“There is only one sorrow, the sorrow of not being a Saint. —LEON BLOY1”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity