All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [15]
I grew to love reading and writing—they came naturally to me, and they are two love affairs I’ve faithfully kept throughout my life. I guess my first inkling of possibly becoming a writer was probably because of an assignment from my English teacher, Sister Mary Frances. The assignment was simple enough: Write a paragraph about something that happened in your family the day before. My single paragraph quickly grew to six pages. The gist of the story was a jog I took, and along the way I tripped and fell down. I wrote, “All of a sudden I realized I was in soft cement and I couldn’t get out.” My brother, Rob, was playing nearby and heard my cry for help. He came over and hauled me out.
The rest of the story is that by the time I got home, the cement had begun to harden on my pants. My mother was furious that she was going to have to buy me another pair; my safety seemed only an afterthought. I knew that if my mother saw her fury in print, she’d have my father punish me. Remember, appearances were everything. So in one of my first self-edits I ended the story with being rescued by my brother. Sister Mary Frances returned my story with an A across the top. She had made only one correction, changing “all of a sudden” to “suddenly.” Her gentle corrective surprised me; it was so different from what I experienced at home. All of a sudden I felt that someone believed in me. Or I should say “suddenly.”
Reading and writing I enjoyed, but religion not so much. When I was a boy, God was a stained-glass ceiling, a deity way up and out there, remote, big, and harsh. There is a descriptive phrase I’ve used for my early view of God, taken from Flannery O’Connor’s “Turkey” story: God was the “Something Awful.” Flannery wrote of her protagonist, Ruller: “He ran faster and faster, and as he turned up the road to his house, his heart was running as fast as his legs and he was certain that Something Awful was tearing behind him with its arms rigid and its fingers ready to clutch.”1 That’s how I felt about God in those Catholic grade-school years. I never heard any reference to a loving, personal God. The emphasis was on obeying the Ten Commandments in order to avoid punishment.
In that sense, the religious aspect of school was similar to home. In addition to believing God was “something awful,” I also experienced Him as “separate.” A good way to try to explain this is to describe my experience in the confessional booth. One of the priests sat on his side and I sat on mine. I couldn’t see the priest, but at the right time I could hear him. Every once in a while the priest would be gentle, and our conversation would go something like this:
Me: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been a week since my last confession. I hit my brother. I spit at my brother. And I have disobeyed my parents.
Priest: That was a very good confession. You prepared it well. And you have my blessing.… For your penance say three “Our Fathers” and three “Hail Marys.”
But most of the time I swear it seemed like the priest was angry. He was often almost screaming, something like this:
Priest: Don’t you have any respect for your parents? How dare you disobey them! Tell me exactly what you did and do not leave anything out!
Me: My mother sent me to the store to buy a pound of lean bacon and I forgot and bought a pound of fatty. My mother got angry because I disobeyed.
Through the voices of those angry priests, I heard an awful, angry God separate from me and my life. So, like I did at home, I vowed to do what was required for me to avoid punishment: I tried my best to be a good Catholic boy. I even mustered up the courage and tried out one year to be an altar boy, but for some reason I couldn’t memorize the Latin. I knew that I had disappointed