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Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps QUOTES

Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps QUOTES

1 " ...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

2 " ...organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

3 " Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

4 " You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

5 " God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

6 " How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

7 " Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it is the necessary path to liberation. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

8 " Religion is lived by people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is lived by people who have been through hell. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

9 " all mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

10 " Only hour by hour gratitude is strong enough to overcome all temptations to resentment. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

11 " God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

12 " In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

13 " Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different or better past. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

14 " As any good therapist will tell you, you cannot heal what you do not acknowledge, and what you do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control of you from within, festering and destroying you and those around you. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

15 " All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems. The Gospel exposes those lies in every culture: The American addiction to oil, war, and empire; the church’s addiction to its own absolute exceptionalism; the poor person’s addiction to powerlessness and victimhood; the white person’s addiction to superiority; the wealthy person’s addiction to entitlement. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

16 " We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

17 " Sacrificial religion was all exposed in Jesus’ response to any mechanical or mercenary notion of religion, but we soon went right back to it in many Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant forms, because the old ego will always prefer an economy of merit and sacrifice to any economy of grace and unearned love, where we have no control. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

18 " When religion does not move people to the mystical or non-dual level of consciousness9 it is more a part of the problem than any solution whatsoever. It solidifies angers, creates enemies, and is almost always exclusionary of the most recent definition of “sinner.” At this level, it is largely incapable of its supreme task of healing, reconciling, forgiving, and peacemaking. When religion does not give people an inner life or a real prayer life, it is missing its primary vocation. Let me sum up, then, the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of A.A. are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:   We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.   This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true, denied, and avoided, until it is forced upon us—by some reality over which we are powerless—and if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

19 " One has to wonder, do we really want people to grow, or do we just want to be in control of the moment? "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

20 " The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for “enlightenment at gunpoint” (death) instead of enjoying God’s banquet much earlier in life. "

― Richard Rohr , Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps