"Two people excited about the same thing are the beginning of almost everything new, creative, and risky in our world. Surely this is what Jesus meant by his first and most basic definition of church as “two or three gathered.”
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"It seems to me that the only people who can handle power are those who don’t need it too much, those who can equally let go of it and share it. In fact, I’d say that at this difficult moment in history, the only people who can handle power are those who have made journeys through powerlessness."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"Stop idolizing the so-called “1 percent.” There’s nothing worthwhile up there that is not also down here. Worst of all, it has given 99 percent of the world an unnecessary and tragic inferiority complex.
Trinity says that God’s power is not domination, threat, or coercion, but instead is of a totally different nature, one that even Jesus’ followers have not yet adjusted to. If the Father does not dominate the Son, and the Son does not dominate the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit does not dominate the Father or the Son, then there’s no domination in God. All divine power is shared power, which should have entirely changed Christian politics and relationships.
There’s no seeking of power over in the Trinity, but only power with—a giving away, a sharing, a letting go, and thus an infinity of trust and mutuality. This has the power to change all relationships: in marriage, in culture, and even in international relations."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"This is precisely the behavior we’d expect in a binary system— a place of “two-ness” in opposition. At best, when we’re finished yelling at each other, we might try to compromise and form some kind of “synthesis” position out of our dialectic. This is how the philosopher Hegel saw the world: one of dueling dualisms. But the Law of Three asks the question we’ve been asking: What if we don’t live in a binary universe, but instead a ternary universe? If three-ness captures the essence of the cosmos more than two-ness, it means that we can hold our first-force or second-force perspectives iith earnestness, while fully awaiting some third force to arrive and surprise us all out of our neat little boxes."
~ Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance
"The intriguing thing about the mutuality of the Trinity is that the names—the roles— the energies— are really interchangeable.
We don’t want to typecast the Father as the only infinite one, the Son as the only imminent one, or the Spirit as the only intimate one!"
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"Holy Mystery in grateful recognition that we’re not in charge of very much and we understand very little."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"To draw from Karl Rahner again, he suggested that for fifty years we should all basically stop using the word God. Because, he says, we normally don’t have a clue what we are talking about!.....
This becomes quite evident when we see what we have done with Jesus himself, who was given as the fully visible and obvious manifestation— and we still used him for our small culture wars. We still pulled him inside of our smaller psyche and out of the protective silence of the Trinity. We pretended we understood him perfectly whenever we could interpret him for our own wars, prejudices, and dominations. Poor Jesus.
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
He consistently makes the outsider the heroes of his parables and the recipients of God’s multifaceted grace....
By and large, we didn’t get it. Catholicism replicated almost down to fine detail the ritual and legalistic mistakes of Judaism, and Protestantism has imitated us quite well, while trying to cover their tracks by just getting legalistic about very different issues. But it is the same ego game. And one could easily argue that our fellow Abrahamic path, Islam, has followed suit in mirroring our most egregious members-only behavior. Because that’s where immature religion always finds itself; it isn’t first of all a search for Holy Mystery and how to love. Most early religion is a search for the egoic self, a search for the moral high ground, and certainly for being better than those other people over there."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
