Silent Compassion Quotes

“When we lose the contemplative mind, or non-dual consciousness, we invariably create violent people. The dualistic mind is endlessly argumentative, and we created an argumentative continent, which we also exported to North and South America. We see it in our politics; we see it in our Church’s inability to create any sincere interfaith dialogue—or even intra-faith dialogue. The Baptists are still fighting the Anglicans as “lost” and the Evangelicals are dismissing the Catholics as the “Whore of Babylon,” and we Catholics are demeaning everybody else as heretics, and each of us is hiding in our small, smug circles. What a waste of time and good God-energy, while the world suffers and declines. We have divided Jesus.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“The Sunday service alone seldom leads people on deeper or even real journeys; we must begin to be honest about this. All that organized religion can do is to hold you inside the boxing ring long enough so you can begin to ask good questions and expect bigger answers. But it seldom teaches you how to really box with the mystery itself. Organized religion does not tend to cook you! It just keeps you on a low, half-cold simmer. It doesn’t teach you how to expect the mystery to show itself at any profound level. It tends, and I don’t mean to be unkind, to make you codependent upon its own ministry, instead of leading you to know something for yourself, which is really the whole point. It’s like we keep saying, “keep coming back, keep coming back” and you’ll eventually get it. But you don’t because the whole thing is oriented toward something you attend or watch and not to something you can participate in 24/7, even without the ministrations of priest and ministers and formal sacraments. Again, I mean no disrespect. If God-experience depends on formal sacramental ministry from ordained clergy, than 99.9 percent of creation has had no chance to know or love God. That can’t be true. And if the clergy themselves have not gone on a further journey, they don’t know how to send you there or guide you there because they have not gone there themselves yet (see Matthew 23:13). Nemo dat quod not hat, we said in Latin: “You cannot give away what you do not have yourself.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“When you say you love God, you are saying you love everything. Immature religion becomes an excuse for not loving a whole bunch of things and reveals that you have not had an authentic God experience yet. Rigid religion and compulsive religiosity, all unloving religion, is a rather clear sign that you have not met God! Once you have had a unitive experience with God, reality, or even yourself, your life invariably shows two things: quiet confidence and joyous gratitude.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“By the age of seven, almost all of us have separated our body and our soul from our mind, and we give all of our credence to our mind, disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from our souls, which abide and grow more in silence. Descartes”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“Once we begin to learn the contemplative mind, we realize it is almost the natural way of seeing—and we have unlearned it! It is quite natural, as we see in children before the age of six or seven when they start judging and analyzing and distinguishing things one from another.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“The opposite of contemplation is not action, it is reaction.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“Organized religion is an accountability system that holds your feet to the fire long enough to know what the issues really are, who God might just be, and what your own limitations might also be.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“working hypothesis, can move forward with theory, while”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“If you can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then you will find that when you speak, your words will be more well-chosen and calm. Francis”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“As the Dalai Lama says, “My religion is kindness; my only religion is kindness.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“You eventually have to return there to get most ordinary jobs done, but even those you will now do in a less compulsive or driven way.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“I believe the contemplative mind is the mind of Christ.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

“Our Living School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is trying to reintroduce the West to what we call the Perennial Tradition, the underground stream that we all share. That does not mean I encourage you to abandon your own mother tradition. You have to know the rules before you can know how to break the rules properly. You have to be surrendered and accountable to one Tradition, as even the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa both insisted. Otherwise, your ego self is always the decider, and you operate outside the living Body of Christ.”
― Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation