Rohr

Practicing Gratitude: A Path to Rewiring Our Minds

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In the November 28, 2025, edition of Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, the spiritual practice of gratitude is highlighted through the lens of psychological and spiritual growth. The meditation — titled “Minding Positivity” — makes a startling claim: our brains may be wired to cling to negativity. Like Velcro, we instinctively hold on to problems, fears, and regrets, while letting positive experiences slip away like cheese on hot Teflon. 

This tendency — to dwell on what’s wrong rather than celebrate what’s good — can shape how we view ourselves, our lives, and the world. But Rohr draws on neuroscience (notably the work of Rick Hanson) to show that the brain is malleable: by consciously choosing to hold onto positives for at least fifteen seconds, we can recondition our minds. 

In other words: gratitude isn’t optional. It’s a spiritual discipline. By repeatedly turning toward love, trust, patience, and goodness — even in small moments — we gradually build “neuroplasticity”: an increased bandwidth for freedom, openness, and compassion. Rohr frames this rewiring as the very heart of authentic spirituality. 

Why This Matters More Than Ever

  • We live in a negativity-saturated world. Between media cycles, social pressure, and personal anxieties, it’s easy to let negativity dominate our inner narrative. This meditation cuts directly across that tendency.
  • Spirituality isn’t just about morality — it’s about psychology. By linking contemplative practices to brain science, the text bridges faith and neuroscience. Gratitude becomes a practical, embodied discipline.
  • Small shifts can lead to profound transformation. You don’t need great insight or dramatic experiences — just small, regular conscious choices to linger in gratitude. Over time, that can change how you see yourself, others, and your place in the world.

Key Takeaways and Invitation

  • Start simple: notice one small good thing today and hold on to it, mentally or in a journal, for at least 15 seconds.
  • When negativity or fear arises, gently reorient to something authentic, lovely, or kind — even if it feels small or insignificant.
  • See gratitude not as a passing “positive vibe,” but as a spiritual and neurological discipline: a way to expand your capacity for love, acceptance, and presence.
  • Recognize that this kind of transformation — from fear to trust, from reactivity to stillness — is not optional or secondary. It’s essential.

Source: Minding Positivity – Richard Rohr – https://email.cac.org/t/d-e-gjulhtt-tlkrhtkhkt-e/

The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage – Book Interview

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Oprah and Rohr explore the transformative power of embracing tears as a path to healing and societal change, drawing on decades of theological study. Father Rohr weaves the wisdom of Old Testament prophets into our culture, showing how their cries for justice and renewal offer examples for our own breakthroughs. Throughout the episode, Rohr responds to questions from guests seeking to embody his philosophy in their careers, relationships, and everyday life.

One Source of Love – by Richard Rohr

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Yet before you can love your neighbor—your brother or sister—as yourself, you must first love yourself. And to first love yourself, you must know that God loves you now and loves you always.
—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream 

Richard Rohr connects our ability to love others with our ability to receive God’s love. 

Authentic love is of one piece. How we love anything is how we love everything. Jesus commands us to “Love our neighbors as we love ourselves,” and he connects the two great commandments of love of God and of neighbor, saying they are “like” one another (Matthew 22:39). So often, we think this means to love our neighbor with the same amount of love—as much as we love ourselves—when it really means that it is the same Source and the same Love that allows us to love ourselves, others, and God at the same time! That is unfortunately not the way most people understand love, compassion, and forgiveness—yet it is the only way they ever work.  

We cannot sincerely love another or forgive offenses inside of dualistic consciousness. Many pastors and priests have done the people of God a great disservice by preaching the gospel to them but not giving them the tools to live it out. As Jesus put it, “Cut off from the vine, you can do nothing” (John 15:5). The “vine and the branches” offer one of the greatest Christian mystical images of the non-duality between God and the soul. In and with God, I can love everything and everyone—even my enemies. Alone and by myself, my willpower and intellect will seldom be able to love in difficult situations over time. Many folks try to love by willpower, with themselves as the only source. They try to obey the second commandment without the first. It never works long-term. 

Finally, of course, there’s a straight line between love and suffering. If we love anyone or anything deeply and greatly, it’s fairly certain we’ll soon suffer because we have offered control to another, and the cost of self-giving will soon show itself. Undoubtedly, this is why we are told to be faithful in our loves, because such long-term loyalty and truly conscious love will always lead us to the necessary pruning (John 15:2) of the narcissistic self. 

Until we love and until we suffer, we all try to figure out life and death with our minds. Then a Larger Source opens up within us and we “think” and feel quite differently through “knowing the Love, which is beyond all knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19). Thus, Jesus would naturally say something like, “This is my commandment: you must love one another!” (John 13:34). Authentic love (which is always more than an emotion) initially opens the door of awareness and aliveness, and then suffering for that love keeps that door open for mind, body, and will to enter. I suspect for most of us that is the work of a lifetime. 

Reference: 
Adapted from Richard Rohr: Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 206–207. 

Shared from Center for Action and Contemplation – Daily Meditations

HOMECOMING – God Is Bringing Us Home – Richard Rohr

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We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. 
—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets 

In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard speaks about the spiritual path that winds both away from and toward one’s true home:  

The first going out from home we can say is the creation of the ego. While this is a necessary creating, it is also the creating of a separation. It’s taking myself as central. We probably need to do that, at least until we reach middle age. But then we need to allow what we’ve created to be uncreated. Maybe I was a great basketball player, but that’s gone now. Or maybe I was good-looking, but that’s gone now.  

When we can say “yes” to that uncreation and still be happy, we’ve done our work. My True Self is in God and not in what I’ve created. My self-created self gave me a nice trail to walk on, and something to do each day, but it isn’t really me. It might be my career or my vocation; yet as good as it is, it isn’t my True Self.  

In the metaphor of life as a journey, I think it’s finally about coming back home to where we started. As I approach death, I’m thinking about that a lot, because I think the best way to describe what’s coming next is not “I’m dying,” but “I’m finally going home.” I don’t know what it’s like yet, but in my older age I can really trust that it is home. I don’t know where that trust comes from or even what home is like, but I know I’m not going to someplace new. I’m going to all the places I’ve known deeply. They’re pointing me to the big deep, the Big Real. I do think homecoming is what it’s all about. 

Father Richard continues to reflect upon finding his home in God in this season of his life:  

Well first, I have to say, I don’t fully know how to live there. I’m used to living for 80 years out of building an education, a persona, a reputation, a career. When we’ve worked at those things for so long, on a very real level we don’t know how to live without them. But thank God, they’re taken away from us. God slows us down, I think necessarily, or we won’t fall into the True Self.  

My understanding of the second half of life is mostly homesickness for the True Self. I want to learn to be who God really created me to be. And I think all God wants me to be is who I really am.

Shared by – https://cac.org/daily-meditations/

Celebrating Incarnation –

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Richard Rohr describes why Christmas and celebrating the Incarnation of Jesus is foundational to Franciscan spirituality:

In the first 1200 years of Christianity, the central feast or celebration was Easter, with the high holy days of Holy Week leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Christ. But in the thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi entered the scene. He intuited that we didn’t need to wait for God to love us through the cross and resurrection. Francis believed the whole thing started with incarnate love. He popularized what we now take for granted as Christmas, which for many became the major Christian feast. Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation when we celebrate God taking human form in the birth of Jesus.

Francis realized that since God had become flesh—taken on materiality, physicality, humanity—then we didn’t have to wait for Good Friday and Easter to “solve the problem” of human sin: the problem was solved from the beginning. It makes sense that Christmas became the great celebratory feast of Christians because it basically says that it’s good to be human, it’s good to be on this Earth, it’s good to have a body, it’s good to have emotions. We don’t need to be ashamed of any of it! God loves matter and physicality.

With that insight, it’s no wonder Francis went wild over Christmas. (I do too—my little house is filled with candles at Christmastime.) Francis believed that trees should be decorated with lights to show their true status as God’s creations, and that’s exactly what we still do eight hundred years later.

And there’s more: when we speak of Advent or preparing for Christmas, we’re not just talking about waiting for the little baby Jesus to be born. That already happened two thousand years ago. In fact, we’re welcoming the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ, the Christ that is forever being born (incarnating) in the human soul and into history.

We do have to make room for such a mystery, because right now there is “no room in the inn.” We see things pretty much in their materiality, but we don’t see the light shining through. We don’t see the incarnate spirit that is hidden inside of everything material.

The early Eastern Church, which too few people in the United States and Western Europe are familiar with, made it very clear that the Incarnation of Christ manifests a universal principle. Incarnation meant not just that God became Jesus, but that God said yes to the material universe and physicality itself. Eastern Christianity understands the mystery of incarnation in the universal sense. So it is always Advent because God is forever coming into the world (see John 1:9).

We’re always waiting to see Spirit revealing itself through matter. We’re always waiting for matter to become a new form in which Spirit is revealed. Whenever that happens, we’re celebrating Christmas. The gifts of incarnation just keep coming! Perhaps this is enlightenment.

Shared via https://cac.org/daily-meditations/ – Center for Action and Contemplation

Adapted from An Advent Meditation with Richard Rohr (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2017), video. No longer available.

Kindness at Gate A-4 – by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Arab-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye recalls a transformative, unexpected occasion of generous acceptance:

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal … I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. “Help,” said the flight service person. “Talk to her.… We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. “Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani Schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment.… I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother … and would ride next to her.… She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought … why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free beverages … and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A-4,” in Honeybee: Poems & Short Prose (New York: Greenwillow Books, 2008), 162–164. 

Shared via https://cac.org/daily-meditations/ – Center for Action and Contemplation

God Is Being Itself – Richard Rohr

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The great chain of being was the medieval metaphor for ecology before we spoke of ecosystems. While it was structured as a hierarchy, with each link in the chain “closer” to God, I view it as a philosophical and theological attempt to speak of the interconnectedness of all things on the level of pure “Being.” Today we might call it “the circle of life.” If God is Being Itself (Deus est Ens), as both St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas taught in the thirteenth century, then the great chain became a way of teaching and preserving the inherent dignity of all things that participate in that Divine Being in various ways. For me, it speaks of the inherent sacrality, interconnectedness, and communality of creation.

These are the links in the great chain of being:

Link 1:  The firmament/Earth/minerals within the Earth
Link 2:  The waters upon the Earth (snow, ice, water, steam, mist)
Link 3:  The plants, trees, flowers, and foods that grow upon the Earth
Link 4:  The animals on the Earth, in the skies, and in the seas
Link 5:  The human species, capable of reflecting on the other links
Link 6:  The heavenly realm/Communion of Saints/angels and spirits
Link 7:  God/the Divine Realm/the Mystery that creates a universe as such, which needs a Center, Source, and Ground for any coherence.

Such a graphic metaphor held all things together in an enchanted universe. If we could not see the sacred in nature and creatures, we soon could not see it at all. [1]

As the medieval theologians predicted, once the chain was broken and one link not honored, the whole vision collapsed. Either we acknowledge that God is in all things, or we have lost the basis for seeing God in anything. Once the choice is ours and not God’s, it is merely a world of private preferences and prejudices. The “cosmic egg” is shattered.

Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274), who is called the second founder of the Franciscan Order, took Francis’ intuitive genius and spelled it out into an entire philosophy. “The magnitude of things … clearly manifests the immensity of the power, wisdom, and goodness of the triune God, who by his power, presence, and essence exists uncircumscribed in all things.” [2] Bonaventure expanded on Alan of Lille’s philosophical idea of God as one “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” God is “within all things but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased.” [3] Therefore the origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, fullness, activity, and order of all created things are the very “footprints” and “fingerprints” (vestigia) of God. [4]

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, insert in A New Cosmology: Nature as the First Bible (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2009). Available as MP3 audio download. 

[2] Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God 1.14, trans. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 65.  

[3] Bonaventure, Soul’s Journey 5.8; Cousins, 100–101. 

[4] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2001, 2020), 149–150. 

Truth and Reconciliation – Richard Rohr

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Almost all religions and cultures that I know of have believed in one way or another that sin and evil are to be punished and retribution is to be demanded of the sinner in this world—and usually the next world, too. Such retributive justice is a dualistic system of reward and punishment, good folks and bad folks, and makes perfect sense to the ego. I call it the economy of merit or “meritocracy.” This system seems to be the best that prisons, courtrooms, wars, and even most of the church (which should know better) appear equipped to do.  

Jesus, many mystics, and other wisdom traditions—such as the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous—show that sin and failure are, in fact, an opportunity for the transformation and enlightenment of the offender.  

Mere counting and ledger-keeping are not the way of the Gospel. Our best self wants to restore relationships, and not blame or punish. This is the “economy of grace.” (The trouble is that we defined God as “punisher-in-chief” instead of Healer, Forgiver, and Reconciler and so the retribution model was legitimized all the way down!)  

What humanity really needs is an honest exposure of the truth and accountability for what has happened. Only then can human beings move ahead with dignity. Hurt needs to be spoken and heard. It does not just go away on its own. This can then lead to “restorative justice,” which is what the prophets invariably promise to the people of Israel (see Ezekiel 16:53; Isaiah 57:17–19) and is exemplified in Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32) and throughout his healing ministry. We lose that and we lose the Gospel itself. 

As any good therapist knows, we cannot heal what we do not acknowledge. What we do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control from within, festering and destroying us and those around us. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus teaches, “If you bring forth that which is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.” [1]  

Only mutual apology, healing, and forgiveness offer a sustainable future for humanity. Otherwise, we are controlled by the past, individually and corporately. We all need to apologize and we all need to forgive or this human project will surely self-destruct. No wonder almost two-thirds of Jesus’ teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness. Otherwise, history devolves into taking sides, bitterness, holding grudges, and the violence that inevitably follows. As others have said, “Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different past.” Reality is what it is, and such acceptance leads to great freedom, as long as there is also both accountability and healing forgiveness. 

[1] Gospel of Thomas, saying 70. For other translations of the Gospel of Thomas and links to additional resources, see http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_thomas.htm 

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps 10th anniv. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), 37–38, 45–46. 

A Warning to Religion from the Garden of Eden – Richard Rohr

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The sin warned against at the very beginning of the Bible is “to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). It does not sound like that should be a sin at all, does it? But the moment I sit on my throne, where I know with certitude who the good guys and the bad guys are, then I’m capable of great evil—while not thinking of it as evil! I have eaten of a dangerous tree, according to the Bible. Don’t judge, don’t label, don’t rush to judgment. You don’t usually know other people’s real motives or intentions. You hardly know your own.

The author of the classic book The Cloud of Unknowing says that first, you have to enter into “the cloud of forgetting. Forget all your certitudes, all your labels, all your explanations, whereby you’ve put this person in this box, determined this group is going to heaven, decided this race is superior to that race. Just forget it. It’s largely a waste of time. It’s usually your ego projecting itself, announcing itself, and protecting itself. It has little to do with objective reality or real love of the truth. If the world and the world’s religions do not learn this kind of humility and patience very soon, I think we’re in historical trouble.

+Adapted from Beginner’s Mind (Recording).