I look at Brennan Manning and see and man I want to be like and a man I want to pretend I never saw.  He cannot see well enough to sit down unaided.  His frail shoulders threaten to snap if the church air conditioning fan is turned up.  His jeans would style a clash between a hip-hop teenager and a hippie rather than a seventy-five year old man.  He pauses awkwardly in the middle of sentences, sometimes changing the subject in the process.  And yet, his words turn to gold to an audience waiting like hungry babies.  Passion colors his face, a passion redefined by the fact that he has lived the journey through with belief and heart intact and will die soon.  He still believes enough to raise his voice in excitement to an audience he has no reason to manipulate and cannot base his self-worth on because he cannot see their facial response.  People listen because this man has led with his brokenness, his courage and trust that his failures and exposed flesh have power to bless.  And so, in some way, he is the essence of his opening statement, that it is better to live naked in truth than clothed in fantasy.

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We ought to give thanks for all fortune; if it is “good,” because it is good, if “bad” because it works in us patience, humility, and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.

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He spoke about the gospel.  About religion beginning with God’s movement toward us and not the other way around.  About brokenness and pain and crying out.  About dying and selfishness and scandalous grace.  His resume supported his message:  he became “an aguador (water carrier), transporting water to rural villages via donkey and buckboard; a mason’s assistant, shoveling mud and straw in the blazing Spanish heat; a dishwasher in France; a voluntary prisoner in a Swiss jail, his identity as a priest known only to the warden; a solitary contemplative secluded in a remote cave for six months in the Zaragoza desert.”  He later returned to the United States and served and ministered to shrimpers in Alabama and lepers in Louisiana.  His message focused not on his journey, but on words burned into his life, “Once you come to know the love of Jesus Christ, nothing else in the world will seem as beautiful or desirable.”  So he spoke about the love of a Father, about our inability to hear his tender voice, and our refusal to believe him when we do listen.  He said God likes us, not just loves us because theologically he has to, but that he actually delights in who we are and not who we could or should be.  He spoke about a heart big enough and a grace wide enough to cover an alcoholic that depends on his home group christened the “Camel Club”, since a camel can go forever without a drink.

When he was done, I asked him to sign my book, unaware that his eyes could hardly see the page before him.  He pressed his pen to the title page of The Ragamuffin Gospel and inscribed “Brennan” directly over the word “Gospel”.  Fitting, not because he has marked the gospel, but because the gospel has marked him.

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I was trying to think of a good operating definition of marriage the other day and this is what I came up with: Two guarded people managing their disappointment, negotiating for better terms through a DMZ they call marriage.

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You avoid forcing your characters to march too steadily to the drumbeat of your artistic purpose. You leave some measure of real freedom for your characters to be themselves. And if minor characters show an inclination to become major characters, as they’re apt to do, you at least give them a shot at it, because in the world of fiction it may take many pages before you find out who the major characters really are, just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done more to point you to where your true homeland lies than your priest or your best friend or even your psychiatrist.

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Fellow traveler let me take you to a place where I’ve found rest
Fellow seeker let me show you where I’ve found true happiness
Fellow beggar I have good news, I know where there is bread

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From Homer, who never omits to tells us that the ships were black and the sea salty, or even wet, down to Eliot with his ‘hollow valley’ and ‘multifoliate rose,’ poets are always telling us that grass is green, or thunder loud, or lips red. This is the most remarkable of the powers of poetic language: to convey to us the quality of experiences.

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Continued from this post: My Sister, Daniel Boone

Further up and further in! The cry comes from Lewis’s finale in Narnia as Aslan’s faithful race deeper into a redeemed landscape.  They race along a sort of spiritual frontier propelled by one belief: There is more.  The same conviction inspires my sister as she travels the world.  There is more.  It’s human nature to sweep that truth under a rug inscribed “Home Sweet Home”.  We settle for less, relax in the comfortable.  The professional field of education is a great example.  I attend professional growth conferences and watch veteran teachers duck out consistently throughout the day.  Sometimes by lunchtime, numbers have fallen by fifty percent.  Teachers, entrenched in their own system, exchange the opportunity for growth with the chance for a free afternoon.  Don’t get me wrong, many times I’ve counted the droplets of condensation on the Hyatt water glass.  But the mindset to settle scares me.  On the grand scale, any business system that allows employees to attain tenure risks the return of complacency.

Go for more.  These words rose up in my heart a few weeks back.  I took inventory of my life.  For the first time in years, I had not moved locations or jobs.  I had accumulated more and more Polos, furniture, and gadgets.  As I judged the exterior of my life, I began to worry that I’d settled into the white picket fence and 2.5 kids.  Might evil lull us to sleep in the crib of contentment?  That was my fear.  Go for more.  The message applied to the interior, and it combated the subtle whisper that I’d experienced all God had to give.  Theologically that sounds crazy.  Realistically and practically, though, count the spiritually dormant lives.

There is more.

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The best gift I can give somebody is how do I take what’s insecure and help it relax and feel secure so that I can discover who that person is in there, really.  I’ve never done that with and for someone that I didn’t end up absolutely enthralled with what I saw inside of them.

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Humankind is addicted to stories. No matter our mood, in reverie or expectation, panic or peace, we can be found stringing together incidents, and unfolding episodes. We turn our pain into narrative so we can bear it; we turn our ecstasy into narrative so we can prolong it. We tell our stories to live.

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