43 Quotes by Ronald Rolheiser

Resiliency is the key to love.

It is no easy task to walk this earth and find peace.

In Western culture, the joyous shouting of children often irritates us because it interferes with our depression. That is why we have invented a term, hyperactivity, so that we can, in good conscience, sedate the spontaneous joy in many of our children.

You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime – perhaps not today, but sometime – you are able to hear God say to you, “I love you!” These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.

Being lonely does not mean that we are abnormal, love-starved, oversexed, or alienated. Perhaps all it means is that we are incurably human and sensitive to the fact that God made us for an ecstatic togetherness in a body with divine love and with all other persons of sincere will.

We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly. In that sense, readying ourselves for death is really an ever-widening entry into life.

Faith is not a question of basking in the certainty that there is a God and that God is taking care of us. Many of us are never granted this kind of assurance. Certitude is not the real substance of faith. Faith is a way of seeing things.

The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.

You feel your own life – your heart, your mind, your body, your sexuality, the people and things you are connected to – and you spontaneously fill with the exclamation: “God, it feels great to be alive!” That’s delight.