All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [19]
8
As a member of the armed services, I could apply for tuition assistance to pursue an undergraduate or graduate degree from a college or university. After going through a ton of red tape, I received an early discharge in 1955 and began the fall semester at the University of Missouri, determined to pursue my dream of becoming a writer. At that time the University of Missouri had one of the premier programs in journalism. I had no idea I was about to have a dream within a dream. I’ve recounted this experience in my books and talks over the years. I repeat it here because of its profound importance in my life.
I was roused one morning from a startling dream. The dream was essentially that I had achieved all my aspirations of status and station. You might call it “the pretty dream”—pretty wife, pretty exclusive home, pretty fast car, pretty great money, and pretty impressive literary awards like the Nobel Prize for Literature. I woke up in horror to exclaim, “My God, there’s got to be more!” For a twenty-one-year-old about to set sail on a course for “pretty,” the dream was nothing short of troubling. I thought I’d finally found some direction and purpose, a path to be me. But that dream stopped everything in its tracks when I felt that having it all wouldn’t be enough. It’s hard to know too much when you’re in your early twenties, but I did know that I didn’t want to live the rest of my life only to be, as Goethe put it, “a troubled guest on the dark earth.”
There’s no way I would have described myself at that age as religious, much less spiritual, but nevertheless I made an appointment to visit the spiritual director on campus. I needed someone to talk to, someone to try to help me interpret my dream. I would so like to honor that man’s name in print; I do wish I could remember his name, but I can’t. He listened intently to my description of the dream, followed by my troubled plea for “more.” That gentle man looked at me and said, “Richard, maybe the ‘more’ is God.”
A casual observer might look at my decision to join the Marines as one made on a whim; my friends and I just decided to do it. There’s some truth to that. The same observer might look at my decision to leave the University of Missouri after only one semester and enter a Franciscan seminary as equally whimsical, maybe even foolhardy. But I would resist that. No friends accompanied me in that departure; in fact, I had little, if any, support. And while the military decision held the possibility of fame, that spiritual decision had the potential for “more.” More what? I wasn’t exactly sure, but like the disciples who dropped their nets and followed Jesus, I dropped my well-laid plans and followed my new dream.
I’ve written before that this was when I embarked on my search for God. But I’m really not certain I could have articulated what I was actually searching for; words like meaning and purpose held just as much weight for me as God. It was definitely a confusing time made even more difficult by my family’s inability to extend mercy or wisdom. I believe they saw my decision to enter the Franciscan seminary in Loretto, Pennsylvania, as nothing more than an epic display of cowardice. My brother, Rob, even bet me fifty dollars I wouldn’t last a week in the seminary. To them, I was like Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Conrad wrote it perfectly:
It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.1
I did last a week at seminary, but barely. Looking back, going from a uniformed Marine to a robed brother may not have been the smartest next step in my quest