BRENNAN MANNING'S STORY

My son asked me the other day if I had ever written anything about Brennan Manning.  He asked to read it if I had done so.  Truth is, I’ve not written about Brennan Manning, and for the life of me I don’t know why.

  I’ve read just about everything I know Manning wrote.  I quote him often in messages and articles and conversations.  A thousand times God has drawn near to me through the heart and mind of this man, so much so that I call him one of my literary mentors.  I heard him speak once, and thought about meeting him at that time, but the line was so long and he was so busy I decided not to join the crowd but simply to hear what he was saying in his messages, articles and books.  Now, because of technology, I turn to YouTube often just to see him and hear about what God was saying to him in the midst of his very real, very human, and very broken, life.

           

Like so many other people I was introduced to Brennan Manning through his book Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out.  It was then I started following him from a distance.  I read his work, followed his life, agonized in his setbacks, rejoiced in his victories, and always stood amazed that in this very human man Jesus kept showing up, revealing to us a love and grace that staggers the imagination and sets one’s soul soaring.

Mind you, Brennan Manning was no hero to me.  To make him a hero I think would have distressed him.  He didn’t want to be seen that way.  Instead, he was a man who couldn’t seem to break free from certain aspects of brokenness but who also refused to let his brokenness be the final word.  He kept drawing near God, refused to walk away from God, and kept coming to Jesus, as the old song says, “Just as I am without one plea but that Thy blood was shed for me.”

Manning was an author, a priest, a contemplative and a speaker. His heart identified with the marginalized, the disenfranchised, the lonely, the outcast, the abused.  If I had one word that best described him it would be, authentic.  He was weak, he knew it, and he didn’t hide from it.  He did desperately need God, and every time I’ve read his words through the years, I've felt I was in the presence of somebody who modeled being a recipient of God’s amazing grace.  He never seemed to be anybody other than who he was.

            Manning wasn’t a saint.  He was sinner saved by grace.  He was a man who had a heart for God.   It was a broken heart, a wounded heart, a searching heart, but it wasn’t a perfect heart.  He staggered, slipped, fell, and struggled.  He did it all, however, in the presence of God.  He did not run from God when he stumbled.  He ran into the arms of God.

            I think this is what most attracted me to him.  In The Ragamuffin Gospel Manning wrote,

We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that he should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at his love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground. 

Over the years every time I came to his books or articles or sermons, I felt like I was standing in the presence of a man who was really “astonished at the goodness of God.”  I think he was stunned that God called him by name and bewildered that at any given moment he was standing on holy ground. 

Truth is that in Brennan Manning’s astonishment I was drawn to God in new ways so that I began to be astonished, too.  He help me to see that God really does love sinners right where they are, that he really does know their name, that they matter to Him, that each one is his child, and that it is okay to be open, truthful, honest, authentic, even broken, in the presence of God and each other.  In Abba’s Child he challenged his readers to “define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”

It was through Brennan Manning, and others like him, that I began to see God not in some abstract theological way but as up-close and personal.  I came to a place where I began to experience Jesus in the sense that John wrote about him in I John 1:1, “What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of God.”  I couldn’t experience Jesus exactly as John did, but I began to get Jesus out of black words on white paper and into the messiness of the world in which I lived.  Jesus really did become an incarnational Savior. 

           

Brennan Manning helped me to see Jesus, to experience the love of God in the reality of my own life, and to see that God is passionate about His creation, about each one of us who have been created in His image.  Like Brennan Manning I am no saint.  Still I have and am, even in this moment, experiencing the poured out and lavished grace of God.

In his memoir, All Is Grace, Manning speaks of God’s grace as God seeks to draw near sinful, broken, and hurting humanity.  He candidly says what each one of us believes deep down inside our lives, or at least, wants to believe.   

     My life is a witness to vulgar grace -- a grace that amazes as it offends. A grace that pays the eager beaver who works all day long the same wage as the grinning drunk who shows up at ten till five. A grace that hikes up the robe and runs breakneck toward the prodigal reeking of sin and wraps him up and decides to throw a party, no ifs, ands, or buts. A grace that raises bloodshot eyes to a dying thief's request -- "Please, remember me" -- and assures him, "You bet!" A grace that is the pleasure of the Father, fleshed out in the carpenter Messiah, Jesus the Christ, who left His Father's side not for heaven's sake but for our sakes, yours and mine. This vulgar grace is indiscriminate compassion. It works without asking anything of us. It's not cheap. It's free, and as such will always be a banana peel for the orthodox foot and a fairy tale for the grown-up sensibility. Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try and find something or someone that it cannot cover. Grace is enough... He is enough…Jesus is enough.

            Even at this late date in my life I'm not sure I know how to get my head around a grace like that.  Then, maybe I'm not supposed to.  Maybe I'm just supposed to stand amazed, awestruck, stunned, and bewildered as I look into the face of Jesus and realize I am looking into the face of God.  Maybe it is okay to just be still and sing

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

            Brennan Manning help me to see that if God is really about grace, then I really can't earn a place at His table.  It has to be given me.  In the words of Augustus Toplady, given to us in 1776, maybe it really does come down to one thing,

Nothing in my hand I bring,

Simply to the cross I cling;

Brennan Manning passed away on April 12, 2013, at the age of 79 (April 27, 1934 – April 12, 2013).  I mourned his passing but I still celebrate his life.  I celebrate not because he was a saint but because, broken though he was, he refused to cover-up his life and live in secret.  He laid it out for God and for all the world to see.   “All is grace. It is enough.  And it’s beautiful.”