Quotes about Understanding
The advantage of those on the further journey is that they can still remember and respect the first language and task. They have transcended but also included all that went before. In fact, if you cannot include and integrate the wisdom of the first half of life, I doubt if you have moved to the second. Never throw out the baby with the bathwater. People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. They are not mere iconoclasts or rebels.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
Remember, mystery isn't something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand!
— Fr. Richard Rohr
It is no longer about being correct. It is about being connected. Being in right relationship is much, much better than just trying to be "right.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean "not true," which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!
— Fr. Richard Rohr
Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
What Richard does is more like what Jesus did when he spoke in parables: He takes you to see from one angle, and then backs up and brings you to see from another angle, and then another, and then another, until a whole new way of seeing begins to dawn on you.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
God never intended most human beings to become philosophers or theologians, but God does want all humans to represent the very Sympathy and Empathy of God.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of "salvation." Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not "think" right.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
God never intended most human beings to become philosophers or theologians, but God does want all humans to represent the very Sympathy and Empathy of God. And it's okay if it takes a while to get there.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
Just because you do not have the right word for God does not mean you are not having the right experience.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
For Scotus, as for Bonaventure, the Trinity is the absolute beginning point—and ending point too. Outpouring Love is the inherent shape of the universe, and when we love, only then do we fully exist in this universe. We do not need to "understand" what is happening, or who God is, before we can live in love. The will to love precedes any need to fully understand what we are doing, the Franciscan School would say.
— Fr. Richard Rohr