Breathing Underwater Quotes

“Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

“You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

“God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“Religion is lived by people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is lived by people who have been through hell.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it is the necessary path to liberation.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“As any good therapist will tell you, you cannot heal what you do not acknowledge, and what you do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control of you from within, festering and destroying you and those around you.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“all mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems. The Gospel exposes those lies in every culture: The American addiction to oil, war, and empire; the church’s addiction to its own absolute exceptionalism; the poor person’s addiction to powerlessness and victimhood; the white person’s addiction to superiority; the wealthy person’s addiction to entitlement.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“Only hour by hour gratitude is strong enough to overcome all temptations to resentment.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different or better past.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“When religion does not move people to the mystical or non-dual level of consciousness9 it is more a part of the problem than any solution whatsoever. It solidifies angers, creates enemies, and is almost always exclusionary of the most recent definition of “sinner.” At this level, it is largely incapable of its supreme task of healing, reconciling, forgiving, and peacemaking. When religion does not give people an inner life or a real prayer life, it is missing its primary vocation. Let me sum up, then, the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of A.A. are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:   We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.   This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true, denied, and avoided, until it is forced upon us—by some reality over which we are powerless—and if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“Breathing Under Water,” a title taken from a telling poem by Carol Bieleck, r.s.c.j., which seemed to sum up so much of the common message. I quote it here in full:   “Breathing Under Water”   I built my house by the sea. Not on the sands, mind you; not on the shifting sand. And I built it of rock. A strong house by a strong sea. And we got well acquainted, the sea and I. Good neighbors. Not that we spoke much. We met in silences. Respectful, keeping our distance, but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand. Always, the fence of sand our barrier, always, the sand between.   And then one day, —and I still don’t know how it happened— the sea came. Without warning.   Without welcome, even Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine, less like the flow of water than the flow of blood. Slow, but coming. Slow, but flowing like an open wound. And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of death. And while I thought the sea crept higher, till it reached my door. And I knew then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning. That when the sea comes calling you stop being neighbors Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance, neighbors And you give your house for a coral castle, And you learn to breathe underwater.3”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“One has to wonder, do we really want people to grow, or do we just want to be in control of the moment?”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“you are often most gifted to heal others precisely where you yourself were wounded, or wounded others.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“Sacrificial religion was all exposed in Jesus’ response to any mechanical or mercenary notion of religion, but we soon went right back to it in many Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant forms, because the old ego will always prefer an economy of merit and sacrifice to any economy of grace and unearned love, where we have no control.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“Almost all true spirituality has a paradoxical character to it, which is why the totally rational or dualistic mind invariably misses the point, and just calls things it does not understand wrong, heresy, or stupid.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different or better past.” It is what it is, and such acceptance leads to great freedom, as long as there is also accountability and healing in the process.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for “enlightenment at gunpoint” (death) instead of enjoying God’s banquet much earlier in life.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“All Mature Spirituality Is About Letting Go”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“...organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

“Catholic confession became a pious devotional exercise and had little to do with the development of real conscience or societal maturity. All notions of social sin, offenses against the common good, the family, the neighborhood, the rest of creation, or the future were all forgotten in favor of a few “hot” sins and an endless laundry list of trivia that we barely felt guilty about. Half of all confessions are about “missing Mass on Sunday.” We used to say that hearing 90 percent of confessions was like being stoned to death with marshmallows!”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“the Twelve Steps, however, believes that sin and failure are, in fact, the setting and opportunity for the transformation and enlightenment of the offender”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“We each have our inner program for happiness, our plans by which we can be secure, esteemed, and in control, and are blissfully unaware that these cannot work for us for the long haul—without our becoming more and more control freaks ourselves. Something has to break our primary addiction, which is to our own power and our false programs for happiness.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality And The Twelve Steps

“Deep communion and dear compassion is formed much more by shared pain than by shared pleasure.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“As my father, St. Francis, put it, when the heart is pure, “Love responds to Love alone” and has little to do with duty, obligation, requirement, or heroic anything. It is easy to surrender when you know that nothing but Love and Mercy is on the other side.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater