Quotes about Identity
Love is not something you do; love is someone you are. It is your True Self.8 Love is where you came from and love is where you're going. It's not something you can buy. It's not something you can attain. It is the presence of God within you, called the Holy Spirit—or what some theologians name uncreated grace.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
Your True Self is who you are, and always have been in God . . . The great surprise and irony is that you, or who you think you are, have nothing to do with its original creation or its demise. It's sort of disempowering and utterly empowering at the same time, isn't it? All you can do is nurture it.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
We have to let go of the passing names by which we have tried to name ourselves and become the "naked self before the naked God." That will always feel like dying, because we are so attached to our passing names and identities. Your bare, undecorated self is already and forever the beloved child of God. When you can rest there, you will begin to share in the universal Christ consciousness, the very "mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:16).
— Fr. Richard Rohr
If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change. It will think up a thousand other things to be concerned about or be moralistic about—anything rather than giving up "who I think I am" and "who I need to be to look good.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!
— Fr. Richard Rohr
your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).
— Fr. Richard Rohr
God oft-times doesn't give a lot of answers but just keeps telling us who we are. God just keeps inviting us into that place where love is alive and where God is in love.
— Fr. Richard Rohr
What we call Original Sin in Genesis perhaps could, in a sense, be better called Original Shame, because Adam and Eve describe themselves as feeling naked. Some of the first words of God to these newly created people are, "Who told you that you were naked?" (Genesis 3:11). Next, in a lovely maternal image, God as seamstress sews leather garments for them (3:21). The first thing God does after creation itself is cover the shame of these new creatures.
— Fr. Richard Rohr