All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [23]
I was devastated; everything felt Brennan-centered instead of Christ-focused. I felt like my life was a waste, and it made me physically sick. I stood from my ostensibly pious posture of prayer upon hearing an old voice: He’ll never amount to much. I realize this sounds extreme and like it came out of nowhere, but that’s how I recall it. I’ve had several very clear dreams over the course of my life and my reaction to them has always seemed rash, almost like any dramatic dream demanded an equally dramatic response. So in that moment I determined to commit spiritual suicide, cut myself off from God and the church and the Brothers, turn my back on it all. I didn’t know what else I could do. But then someone said, “Hi.”
Brother Dominique Voillaume saw my exit from the chapel and asked me what happened. So I told him, told him everything, about my disgust with my own motives and my thoughts of walking away from it all. In that moment he said a powerful thing, a life-changing thing: “You are on the threshold of receiving the greatest grace of your life. You are discovering what it means to be poor in spirit. Brother Brennan, it’s okay not to be okay.”
My gut reaction was, This guy’s a loon. But then he led me to the first Beatitude as translated from the New English Bible:
How blessed are those who know that they are poor,
the kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
I’ve met many people who’ve told me their doorway to salvation was a hellfire preacher pounding John 3:16. But that’s not how it was for me. One of my most memorable lost-then-found moments came via the tender, piercing invitation of a six-foot-two “Little” Brother and Matthew 5:3.
I have written a passage about Brother Dominique Voillaume in my books Gentle Revolutionaries (later reissued as The Importance of Being Foolish) and The Signature of Jesus. I’ll repeat that story here, one more time, because I must out of gratitude for the ways his life touched mine and so many others. As this story honors my good friend, it also reveals the inconsistent nature of my life. You see me here one moment about to commit spiritual hara-kiri and the next moment acting like someone who could care less about the ways of God. When I wrote once about “the inconsistent, unsteady disciples whose cheese is falling off their cracker,” I was talking about myself.
Mobbed by pigeons in Saint Mark’s Square, Venice, March 1968. This photo was taken on a weekend vacation while I was serving with the Little Brothers of Jesus.
There is one day in Saint-Rémy in 1969—New Year’s Day to be exact—that my brothers and I would never forget.
We had gathered around our common table, and our talk started out as the standard workman’s lament: poor wages, lousy hours, hypocritical employers. Essentially we were singing the blues. But then we rapidly descended into a holier-than-thou rant of comparisons and judgments and how our mammon-loving patrons we selflessly served couldn’t possibly compare with the pure-hearted Little Brothers of Jesus. But Brother Dominique sat at the end of our table and began to cry.
“Dominique, please, what is the matter?”
“Ils ne comprennent pas,” he said. (Translated, “They don’t understand.”)
Was my friend and mentor referring to the people we had just verbally maligned, those we saw as oblivious to our mercy while they lounged in bed and made love and drank wine? Or was he actually whispering a prayer for his brothers seated to his right and left, men who had momentarily forgotten our utter poverty before the Father and our kinship with those we so easily condemned? My hope so many, many years later is that his discipline of tears was a covering for us all, a plea of grace streaming to Abba’s ears—“Father, forgive them. Ils