Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of being intentionally aware of our appreciation for others and our devotion to a higher power.
Richard Rohr suggests that as human beings, we have a responsibility to consciously acknowledge and appreciate the beauty and worth of those around us, as well as to cultivate a deliberate connection and devotion to God. This intentionality fosters deeper relationships and spiritual growth, urging us to move beyond passive admiration into a more active and thoughtful practice of gratitude and reverence.
In practice
In a motivational speech about gratitude during a community gathering.
My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.
The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.
Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.
Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members
The world is a reflection of who we are and if we don't like the reflection, it doesn't really help to break the mirror.
My experience of living with people of diverse religions and cultures taught me that one will never be at peace with the other if one is at war with oneself.
The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.
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