All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [20]
After a week in Loretto, I packed my bags. I decided that I had given God a sporting chance. I hadn’t lost all sense of decorum though, so I felt it appropriate to tell Father Augustine “So long.” I stopped by his office on my way out, but he wasn’t in. It was nearly noon.
It’s been said that “we cannot kill time without injuring eternity.” I’m not sure that’s true, because in an effort to kill time waiting for Father Augustine’s return, I visited the chapel, and in my case, eternity was forever altered. I decided to grab a prayer book and visit the fourteen stations of the cross. Stations 1–11 remain a blur; maybe they were a necessary prelude, something to get me warmed up.
The word synesthesia describes what happened to me at station 12. Synesthesia is a union of the senses, one type of stimulation evoking the sensation of another. Station 12 is “Jesus dies on the cross.” I was instructed to kneel, so I did. I remember feeling the solidity of the floor. Then the Angelus bell from a nearby monastery gave its noontime toll in the distance. And then I read these words on the page:
Behold Jesus crucified! Behold His wounds, received for love of you! His whole appearance betokens love: His head is bent to kiss you; His arms are extended to embrace you; His heart is open to receive you. O superabundance of love, Jesus, the Son of God, dies upon the cross, that man may live and be delivered from everlasting death!
The next thing I knew, it was a few minutes after three o’clock in the afternoon. Just what happened in those three hours? I was a Marine after all, and soldiers don’t just lose three hours. But I did; all I know is that I had been in another, magnificent realm. The religious scholar Mircea Eliade has referred to this realm as the “Golden World.” I could not agree more.
For three hours I found myself in terra incognita. It was the very heart of Jesus Christ, the place of unconditional love. To have experienced just the terrain would have been sufficient, but then the “more” came: Jesus called my name. I still to this day have not revealed to anyone what I heard; it was not Richard or Richie, but a name by which Jesus alone knows me.
The experience was like roiling waves, spring storms, and bursting dams all in the same breath. Like the prophet Isaiah, it left me a man undone. The little child who heard “Boys don’t cry” throughout his life was then a man sobbing uncontrollably. It seemed the only response I could make to so great a gift—that Jesus had died on the cross for me and then called me by name! The Catholic crucifix finally took on flesh and bone. It was in those golden moments that I was battered by wave after wave of the theology of delight, that God not only loves me but also likes me. I was given a glimpse, an assurance that long ago we wound God’s clock for good. It was not that I found the more but rather the more found me. Christianity was not some moral code; it was a love affair, and I had experienced it firsthand.
The intimacy of those three hours exhausted me. I wobbled to my feet, stumbled back to my room, unpacked my bags, and went straight to bed. After that day nothing has ever been the same. I wasn’t familiar with the verse then, but it is one I would come to claim and seek to live by, still to this day:
There is only Christ: he is everything.
Colossians 3:11
In the days that followed my experience in the chapel, I jumped into God with both feet. I completed my undergraduate degree at St. Francis Seminary, with a major in philosophy and a minor in Latin, then spent a year in Washington, D.C., immersed in a spiritual-formation program, followed by four years of advanced theological study at the seminary. And then, on Saturday, May 18, 1963, seven years after finding “more,” I was ordained a priest. In a surprisingly tender move, my father and mother hired a bus for family and friends, and they all drove to the cathedral in Altoona, Pennsylvania, for the ordination service. The next morning, Sunday, May 19,