All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [1]
without written permission from the publisher.
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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the Jerusalem Bible, copyright © 1966 by Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd. and Doubleday & Co., a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Reprinted by permission. Scripture quotations marked NEB are from The New English Bible, Copyright © 1961 Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
Photos courtesy of Art and Geraldine Rubino,
Roslyn Bourgeois, John Krahm, and Rick Christian
LCCN 2011933706
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-4347-6418-8
International Trade Paperback ISBN 978-0-7814-0616-1
eISBN 978-0-7814-0785-4
© 2011 Brennan Manning
Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200,
Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.
The Team: Don Pape, Nicci Jordan Hubert, Amy Konyndyk, Nick Lee, Jack Campbell, Karen Athen
Cover Design: Gearbox
Cover Photo: Ben Pearson
First Edition 2011
for Roslyn
CONTENTS
Foreword by Philip Yancey
Reader Testimonies
A Word Before
Introduction
Part I: Richard
Part II: Brennan
Part III: Me
A Word After
Photo Gallery
Letters
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
I first met Brennan Manning at an event called Greenbelt Festival in England, a sort of Christian Woodstock of artists, musicians, and speakers that had attracted twenty thousand fans to tents and impromptu venues set up in the muddy infield of a horse-racing track. Brennan seemed dazzled by the spectacle, and like a color commentator, kept trying to explain the subtleties of evangelicalism to his wife, Roslyn, a cradle Catholic who lacked Brennan’s experience with the subculture.
We did not see each other often over the years, but each time our paths crossed, we went deeper rather than tilling the same ground of friendship. When he visited a monastery in Colorado for spiritual retreats, he would sometimes get a temporary dispensation from the rule of silence and meet my wife and me at an ice-cream parlor (one addiction he doesn’t disclose in these pages). Our backgrounds could hardly have been more different—Southern fundamentalism versus Northeastern Catholic—and yet by different routes we had both stumbled upon an artesian well of grace and have been gulping its waters ever since. One glorious fall afternoon we hiked on a carpet of golden aspen leaves along a mountain stream and I heard the details of Brennan’s life: his loveless childhood, his marathon search for God, his marriage and divorce, his lies and cover-ups, his continuing struggles with alcohol addiction.
As you read this memoir, you may be tempted, as I was, to think, Oh, what might have been … if Brennan hadn’t given in to drink. I urge you to reframe the thought to, Oh, what might have been … if Brennan hadn’t discovered grace. More than once I have watched this leprechaun of an Irish-Catholic hold spellbound an audience of thousands by telling in a new and personal way the story that all of us want to hear: that the Maker of all things loves and forgives us. Brennan knows well that love and especially the forgiveness. He may have left the platform that very night for a hotel room and drunk himself senseless. He admits in these pages to having broken all Ten Commandments several times over (murder, Brennan?). Each time he begged for forgiveness, repented to God and to his friends, and got up off the floor to keep walking. Like Christian, the everyman character in The Pilgrim’s Progress, he progressed not by always making right decisions but by responding appropriately to wrong ones. (John Bunyan, after all, titled his own spiritual biography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.)
At one point Brennan likens himself to Samson, that flawed superman whom God somehow found a way to use right