All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [22]
I spent that winter shoveling manure on nearby farms and washing dishes in a local restaurant. I loved every minute of it. I had no students to counsel or meetings to organize or tests to grade; everything was basic, minimal, and such a breath of fresh air. Evenings were set aside for silence in Eucharistic adoration and meditation on the Scriptures. We did not live a cloistered life in cleric’s robes but a plain-clothed existence, contemplatively immersed among the very poor, communicating not through words so much as friendship. We attempted to put Jesus in places where He would normally never be found. We were learning to disengage essentials from nonessentials; not a paradise of solitude, but a place of purging. We lived T. S. Eliot’s prayer: “Teach us to care and not to care.” A favorite book of mine is Carlo Carretto’s Letters from the Desert. He summed up well the call each of the Little Brothers responded to. It sounds quite personal because it was.
Leave everything and come with me into the desert. It is not your acts and deeds that I want; I want your prayer, your love.2
My group of Little Brothers was comprised of six men: two Frenchmen, one German, a Spaniard, a Slav, and me. We soon moved on to Farlete, a small village in the Zaragoza desert of Spain. We spent a year of spiritual formation there, known as the novitiate—a season of training and preparation before becoming officially part of the order.
I look back on those times as days of communion—sharing the poverty, toil, and anxiety of rural peasant life alongside the joys of a baby being born, the nuptial bliss of newlyweds, and the small joys of honest work and sweat and cold beer. My primary job was a mason’s assistant, a rather lofty title for a builder of chicken coops. This work involved bringing in hundreds of field stones to build the coop and then laying them atop a row of cement, followed by another row of stones, then cement, and so on. It was easily 110 degrees that summer, but I didn’t mind it a bit. My other responsibility, and probably the favorite job of my entire life, was that of aguador (water carrier). The village didn’t have running water, so each morning I would ride out in a donkey-driven buckboard with a water tank in the back. I would later return with the prized possession, water. To say I was popular with the people is an understatement.
One of my realizations in such an earthy atmosphere was that many of the burning theological issues in the church were neither burning nor theological. It was not more rhetoric that Jesus demanded but personal renewal, fidelity to the gospel, and creative conduct. Learning how to build chicken coops and haul water to town benefitted me tremendously in this. But it certainly had its downside. Once I essentially learned the tasks, the days grew long and I grew restless, even in that place I dearly loved.
I remember reading about Yvon Chouinard, the iconic founder of Patagonia, in his book Let My People Go Surfing. At one point Chouinard talked of his business rhythm of beginning a new venture, learning the essentials of it, and then moving on to something else. He described it as doing something well to a level of 80 percent and then moving on before reaching 100 percent. When I read those pages, I thought, That describes so much of my life: Learn it well and then leave it. My gut tells me that if someone asked Chouinard “Why?” he would answer as I would: There’s got to be more.
In the Little Brothers, we did have habits, or robes, we would wear only in the chapel. They were a dark gray color embroidered with the Jesus Caritas (Jesus Charity) symbol of a red heart with an outcropped cross. One evening while at prayer, wrapped in those threads, I saw my entire life flash before me. This was not like my pretty dream; it was actually rather ugly. I saw my life as vitiated by pride, by the inordinate desire to be liked, loved, approved, applauded, and accepted. Even though I had done well in