YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Rohr

lines on the record: 40
first: 2025-08-19
most recent: 2025-08-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Father Greg Boyle with the homeboy working with Hispanic street boys of Los Angeles. God, do we think like that he's so generative with it? It's the biggest street boy, if I can use that phrase, organization in the world. And that's what he's generated.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now they deserve the title and they were just so positive, so loving, even though every one of them was addressing major social ills, Brian Stevenson The lynching museum. Montgomery, you've probably had it.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know who used the word generative? Was that Eric Erickson? I'm not sure. It doesn't matter. But you're delighted when you're around generative people who generate other people, other movements, other things than their own.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you're a politician, you're preacher priest, if they aren't capable of healthy self-criticism, I wouldn't follow them too far down the plank because they're going to lead you to a not very enlightened place. They'll always have localized evil in another race, another religion, another gender. Another neighborhood We don't have time for that anymore. We just don't”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This hasn't been taught, you know, I assume maybe you're familiar with St. Paul and the scriptures. He talks about the second And we haven't even allowed it, taught it. He speaks of schools of prophets where you have to be trained in how to positively self-critique.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you have to develop in yourself and in your group is a capacity for positive self-criticism. And once you learn how to positively critique your own games, your own shadow remember the shadow is not evil. We learn this from, well, Jesus talked about the splinter in other people's eyes and the log in your own. He was teaching us the same thing. But if you don't do shadow work, you end up unselfical. And why would you listen to an unself-critical person? Because they'll never see their filters, their agendas, their obsessions. That's certainly much of the first. I'm going to say 45, 50 years of life, learning just how to do that without shaming the self, without hating the self, just recognizing, well, Richard, you've got your own faults too You've got your own blind spots”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who deserves it? When you stop counting your living not in the kingdoms of this world, the kingdoms of this world are all about counting, measuring, weighing. The kingdom of God, as Jesus would call it, the whole game of mathematics falls apart. You can't compute anymore. Now, if you're not willing to let that be done to your mind, to live in an infinite sea of mercy where all counting is meaningless, meaningless, you'll never be a mystic, you'll never be a non-dual enjoyer. And I believe we have to re-situate Christianity in joy, not threat. And that's why I told the story of the angel traveling the streets of the world. A lot of us grew up with threat does not get you there. The way most of us, certainly I in the forties and 50s in Kansas where I grew up, I had very loving parents, but they did threaten us a lot.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to meet a god of limitless love. It has to be limitless. It has to be infinite. But I'm told the human mind just like is hooked by the amygdala. It is positively hooked by unconditional love. And you have to have at least had a taste of that. But I'm told the human mind can't imagine infinite things can. So we portion love out who's worthy of it, who's ready for it. Who deserves it?”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's wake up and see that. I don't work today. A reward, punishment system will not change people. It makes them afraid of God and hate their neighbor with impunity. God wants me to hate those people. Whatever though is”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“History of enslavement. To hear that, we just couldn't hear it. And feudalism couldn't hear it and the war centuries couldn't hear it, but there's more and more people who can hear that. And as you both have been saying, only love wins, only love changes people. That's obvious.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now I'll just finish it since I started I used to use this in a lot of major talks, and people said they never forgot it. The angel walking through the streets of the world has a pail of water and a torch of fire. And people, of course, ask, what are you going to do with that torch and that pail? And the angel is supposed to say, I'm here to burn down the mansions of heaven and to put out the fires of hell. Only then will we know who really loves God. We've got to get beyond this reward punishment scenario because it makes us think that our job is to decide who deserves the reward and who deserves the punishment. It makes Christians inherently judgmental. The first two thousand years Itself was too violent, as we see from our own”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most Christians here is self-criticism, but I hope you don't hear it coming from a negative place. We substituted a reward punishment scenario. Apocalyptic dualism. Forgive the two big words. At the end of our lives, and it largely created fear of God, not love of God. I don't know if you got to the end of the book, the story of the angel. Walking through the streets of the world”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It felt like that's what they were saying. Now, I would have then had to ask, how did they do that? Because I know you can't program tears. We in the church tried to do it, but they didn't come from a deep place too often”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it just, you could see the jolt of recognition. Sadness hides as anger. But once you give permission, a man at least, women have permission already. But we have to give men permission. You're not really an angry man. You're just deeply sad. The whole five day event turned in some ways on that one remark because they wanted to just cover the source of their tears. And that led to this book. Tears of tears.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not making this up. It sounds like a dramatic story, but I visited the Maasai in Africa, and the chief who had read some of my stuff, he gave two warriors permission to walk me around the path that he young warrior had to walk to be initiated. And the most moving part was the caves of grief and these two tough looking guys with spears and shields. They got even soft spoken as we approached these caves. And they said, hear, Father, we had to learn how to cry. And I would explain to the group and say the turning phrase was when I would say many of you thought your father was an angry man, and maybe he was. Many of you think you are an angry man, and maybe you are. But now listen closely. They'd lead forward. This is by the third day they were teachable. And I said, many of you are not angry, you're sad.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most universal one discovered by all of the world religions is some form of mindfulness that you see the games your mind plays. You have to observe it sounds so passive, but once you see it you can't not see it, that you prefer the negative or you prefer problem solving or you prefer being antagonistic scapegoating others. Once you recognize your patterns, you see they're everywhere. For years up at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico where I live, I gave these five day events called men's rights of passage and the turning point I'm not exaggerating for many men was on the third day which we call the day of grief and I had learned this”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About evil and evil's capacity to hurt people. Because otherwise we're going to get in real trouble saying, oh, there's good people on both sides. Oh yes Lot of them are doing some bad stuff that must be named evil must be named. And that was the genius of the prophets. Critiqued Israel first. They critiqued themselves first. And then they said, and they learned this through tears as by Thesis in the whole book. Sadness. They move from anger to sadness. That movement from anger to sadness to compassion is the transformative movement of the prophets.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me throw this into the mix. It doesn't cover every base, but you first have to succeed at dualistic clarity. Like it was this same president who said it was a Charlottesville. Well, there are good people on both sides. That sounds like fuzzy, soft thinking, so I don't have to take a stand. First, I have to say no. This is objectively good. And this is objectively bad. Then you get to what the Eastern religions would call non-duality. First dualistic Jesus Himself, God and Mammon and so forth. He's very dualistic about the big issues. But then when it comes to practical everyday living, you said it a minute ago The response to both of them, the one you like and the one you don't like is love. That's a dance. I think an authentic believer has to do, has to not be naive.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we Catholics made that mistake too long, so we're very impatient with it. We see other people repeating our heresy. It doesn't make for happy people. Are content people, are alive people. I don't think Am I answering your question at all?”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certitude. And after the Enlightenment 17, 18th century, we, even we Christians, felt that our job was to be certain. No, our job is to be loving. That's different. Now, once you've localized evil And they are the evil country, they are the evil religion. If it's so bad now, they are the evil gender. You know, we do this to one another. You don't want to be disallowed that localization. I like the way the world is situated. Good people are here. Bad people are there. Don't make me change my mind. Do you see the love affair with certitude? It's not loving God. I'm sorry. It's not loving, certainly not loving your neighbor. It's not even loving yourself. It's loving your ideas about things.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love forgiving everything. Not consciously, it comes naturally now. I talked to you in one of my earlier talks about the two halves of life. This is good mathematics, but I'm calling it the third half of life, which there can't The third half of life is just it's all okay. It's all okay. I couldn't live with it”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“order Now, if you can put order together with disorder What you end up with reorder. That's enlightenment. Where you don't try to eliminate disorder anymore. You don't try to even, it's going to be shocking to a Christian. You don't even try to eliminate sin. You're not surprised at it. It's a universal phenomenon. We hope we'd sin a little less, but when you see how poorly we've localized sin Always in someone else, another group. They're sinful.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything, and I'm going to say everything has a shadow side. You have the courage to admit that if you've had a good dose of the first good side.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that stabilizes the psyche. There is meaning in the universe. There is order. But then what came along for me exactly at the right time in the 60s was the huge dose of disorder. For us, it was a civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam movement, which began to expose the shadow side as Carl Jung calls it, the shadow side of everything. That's another way of saying the tears of things.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, thank God I was educated first of all in the lives of the saints and the good works of the church. It was admittedly one side of the story. It was later in my life when things like the Inquisition and the pedophile scandal. Were revealed to us Catholics. So I got a good dose of the positive, our philosophical tradition, our theological tradition. They held me fast. I think I use in the book Oprah, correct me if it didn't stick with you that my big three level change is you have to begin with order, then you have to have the courage to admit into your ordered universe that you are given in Mississippi. I was given in Kansas. Both of us raised nice little conservative Christians.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And if you never love anybody or anything, if you never care for anybody enough to weep for them. You'll pretty much stay how you were at 17”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to learn its lesson. How can life be so sad? A lot of us experience that the death for our parents. The death of a child, it always has to be uncalled for, unworthy, unnamed, and that it haunts you for years to come. That undoes the eagle. I always say there's two universal paths of transformation, bigger than Christianity, bigger than any single religion, great love, and great suffering. They have the capacity to change every human being. I don't care what your religion is. Great love and great suffering change the soul. Awaken the soul.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the great things I try to make clear in the book, and it isn't hard to prove at all. I'm just amazed more people haven't preceded me. Is the prophets localize evil not in individual bad apples, but in the collective culture, structural sin, institutional injustice, That you're blind to it. Why? Because everybody's doing it. And I've all agreed it's wonderful.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And see people of color know that we white guys are the last ones to know it. We really naively presumed everybody was free and everybody was in charge of their own destiny. We can't do that anymore.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't play the prophet myself, but you can't go on a course this long without self destructing. It's not going to be an enemy from without. It's going to be massive disillusionment from within. Exactly how that's going to happen, I don't know. But we Americans who thought we were so great, and I don't need to tell you, but we are able to do that by denying how we treated the indigenous people, how we treated the black people, while cheering about our democracy. You know, I mean, democracy didn't even seriously begin till the 1960s That's what happens when you have no healthy self criticism.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why? Because a prophet is always first of all critical of his own self, his own agenda, his own tribe, his own country. And we have a politic that seems to be incapable of self-criticism.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we've largely neglected the prophets. And that was what led me to write the book, that for 37 years out at our center in New Mexico, I taught the Jewish prophets. And each time I'd go through it, I'd say, why aren't more people teaching this? The prophets have had very little effect on Judaism and they're honest about that, as Jesus said, you're going to kill all the prophets and you're going to kill me. And his most quoted line about the prophets is this Noph is honored in his own country. You're familiar with it.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once you're in the flow, it both flows in with some ease and out with some ease. If you're always putting out and never listening to other people or letting them influence you, that's not true prophecy”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nihil means nothing, and we live in a very nihilistic country. When heads of state can get away with telling demonstrable lies, obvious lies and people don't just accept it but applaud. Applaud, you're an Nihilistic culture. And once you've destroyed any appreciation for truth, once that's gone, it's all downhill. I mean, I don't mean to be pessimistic, but you can't walk around telling total lies and build a culture or build a civilization or build a healthy psyche or build a healthy family. When truth is whatever, I want to be the truth. What takes over is not just the amygdala but the ego.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the most unfortunate results of what we call postmodernism. Postmodernism is basically saying, okay, we tried all of these philosophies and theologies and religions, but basically none of them work, and that's called nihilism, nihil is a Latin word. I'm not trying to impress you with my Latin, but it was forced on me.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think more accurately. Well, it does. You know, I know it's an ugly and not common word, but biologists, medical teachers speak of the amygdala. And that's the part of your nervous system that gets hooked whenever someone is speaking to you angrily or fearfully. And I know it's an ugly phrase, but I think we have a whole country of hooked amygdalas.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they come. Unbidden out of the unconscious. Most people just suddenly have to wipe away their tears. They're a little embarrassed by it. Because it isn't object of the will or the intellect. It comes from somewhere else than intellect and will. Both positive tears of joy. And tears of sadness.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first my age. But in some ways it sums up my thinking. My spiritual teaching, I want to be honest about how most people have to suffer. The animals now are suffering, the planet is suffering, so it's spreading to every level. And this generic term, the tears of things, not just the tears of humans, although they say we're the only ones who formally cry. As a Christian, of course, I knew Jesus' words, how happy are those who weep? Is he crazy? What's happy about that? Yeah, but I think it's a transformative movement inside the soul.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he uses a phrase that I'm told is by far the most quoted phrase in Latin literature, and it seems at first hearing, soul, innocent, I'll quote the Latin, don't be impressed, Locum, the Spanish speakers will recognize Loc is their word also for tears. But he's observing this that everything seems to be crying. Everything has tears and everything deserves tears. It was his way of saying when you and I would now call the tragic sense of life, the tragic sense of life, that it can be ignored. Everybody's life sooner or later rushes into tragedy. So I knew for most people they won't have all the connotation, but thank you for liking it.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I was the last generation of priests that had to learn Latin. I was never very good at it. But the great Latin myth that we studied was Virgil's Aeneid. And in the Aeneid, he's a Roman. He goes to Carthage, which was their enemy. He's observing a huge fresco on the wall. And it's a whole field of dead soldiers. Yeah.”
2025-08-19 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT