Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self QUOTES

41 " Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

42 " St. Augustine admits in his Confessions: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late have I loved you! You were within, but I was without. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

43 " We are not so at home with the resurrected form of things despite a yearly springtime, healings in our bodies, the ten thousand forms of newness in every event and every life. The death side of things grabs our imagination and fascinates us as fear and negativity always do, I am sad to say. We have to be taught how to look for anything infinite, positive, or good, which for some reason is much more difficult. We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is “the problem of good.” How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

44 " Within us there is an inner, natural dignity. (You often see it in older folks.) An inherent worthiness that already knows and enjoys. (You see it in children.) It is an immortal diamond waiting to be mined and is never discovered undesired. It is a reverence humming within you that must be honored. Call it the soul, the unconscious, deep consciousness, or the indwelling Holy Spirit. Call it nothing. It does not need the right name or right religion to show itself. It does not even need to be understood. It is usually wordless. It just is, and shows itself best when we are silent, or in love, or both. I will call it the True Self here. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

45 " Thomas Merton, say it, as he so often does: “A door opens in the center of our being, and we seem to fall through it into immense depths, which although they are infinite—are still accessible to us. All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

46 " love, not death, is the eternal thing. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

47 " Any language of exclusion or superiority no longer makes sense to you. Inside your True Self, you know you are not alone, and you foundationally “belong” to God and to the universe (1 Corinthians 3:23). You no longer have to work to feel important. You are intrinsically important, and it has all been “done unto you” (Luke 1:38), just as it was with Mary, who made no claims of worthiness or unworthiness. And if God so gratuitously and graciously includes you here and now in this world, why would such a God change God's mind in the next world? Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

48 " Why, oh why, did we make the Gospel into a competition instead of a joyous proclamation of this necessary but good process—of surrender into love? I think it is because the ego (the False Self) prefers win-lose over win-win, even strangely enough, when it ends up defining oneself as a loser. The ego will always choose trumped-up competition over any calm cooperation. We would sooner run a risky NASCAR race that only one, or a few, of us can win than allow God to win with everybody. It is almost the American way. Such a mind-set is of itself “hell.” It is nothing more than spiritual capitalism. God's big win is accurately called heaven. Heaven is God's victory celebration, not ours! And the banner over the eternal banquet table will say one thing: “Love is stronger than death. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

49 " Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

50 " Metaphor is invariably more meaning, not less. Literalism is the lowest and least level of meaning. We must never be too tied to our own metaphors as the only possible way to speak the truth, and yet we also need good metaphors to go deep. That is the inherent tension and conflict: only the right symbol dives deep into the good, the true, and the beautiful and retrieves these like pearls from the ocean depths. The right symbol at the right time allows us to move beyond complexity and illusion. Often that which looks like mere symbol is indeed the doorway to all that you really need to know—if you approach it humbly and respectfully. How else could an always available God be always available? It cannot depend on having a college education or even a common education, but on a simple ability to read the symbolic universe, which some ancients seem to have done much better than we do.2 "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

51 " Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity but to change the mind of humanity about God. It is “simple and beautiful;” as Einstein said great truth would always have to be. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

52 " God is formlessness (the Father), God is form (the Son), and God is the very life and love energy between those two (the Holy Spirit). The three do not cancel one another out; rather, they do exactly the opposite. God is relationship itself and known in relationship, which opens up a huge conversation with the world of science and physics and therapy too. What a wonderful surprise this is, yet it names everything correctly at the core—from atoms, to ecosystems, to families, to galaxies. The doctrine of the Trinity was made to order to defeat the dualistic mind and invite us into nondual, holistic consciousness. It replaced the argumentative principle of two with the dynamic principle of three. It leaves us inside the wonderfully open space of “not one, but not two either.” Sit stunned with that for a few minutes. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

53 " Without meaning we are surely less than human and deeply discontented. Most meaning is largely preconceptual and not subject to words, and in that sense it is nonrational, but meaning lies in wait to appear and grab onto the right symbol in the right moment. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

54 " Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, “If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”7 "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

55 " Make ready for the Christ, whose smile like lightning, sets free the song of everlasting glory that now sleeps—in your paper flesh. Thomas Merton "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

56 " You do not climb up to your True Self. You fall into it, so don't avoid all falling "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

57 " The pressed clay or “dust” of Adam has then become the immortal diamond that is Christ. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

58 " you no longer need to protect or defend the mere part. You are now connected to something inexhaustible. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

59 " Church” in any form should be a “laboratory for resurrection, "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

60 " you must first “go into the tomb” with Jesus (Romans 6:4) "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self