All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [3]
I started to worship.
Confusion turned to gratitude as I began to see that Brennan’s hellish journey of two steps forward, three steps back kept him so entrenched in a prodigal story that he knew over and over and over and over again the outlandish grace of the Father welcoming him home. I, too, have struggled with addiction, and so Brennan’s story helps make sense of my own; but even if you don’t have an addiction, I know you struggle with something again and again and again. In most testimonies the good news is only a small part of the story, obscured by our achieving and overcoming. In Brennan’s story, and in mine, the good news is the entire story, which blessedly leaves us with nothing to prove or protect.
Allowing Brennan’s story to settle deeply into my own turned anger into trust. Even Brennan’s final days with the humiliating illness of “wet brain” compels me to tell all of my story because it reveals the certainty of the grace of God—how good He is, not how bad I am. If we trust grace, we don’t need to hide who we are from one another. Brennan’s story invited me to ponder what it might take for me to tell the unvarnished truth about my life. Brennan did not need to tell us the dirty details of his alcoholism, and he certainly did not need to leave us with a final picture of himself as blind, feeble of body and mind, unable to speak clearly or even to take care of himself. He might have rested on his best-seller laurels and finished with one last story of someone impacted by his ministry. Then we could have worshipped him a little and aspired to do something great for Jesus.
Brennan tells his story in a way that strips away everything and leaves us with Jesus. I have faced Him before and felt ashamed or angry, but finding Him at the end of this tale of brokenness really did break me open. And there in the ruins of my own story of dreams and heartache and alcohol and success and marriage and children and divorce and church and ministry and betrayal and forgiveness and love and loss, I saw that it is true, and I worshipped. It is true. All is grace.
Sharon A. Hersh, MA, LPC, speaker, and author of The Last Addiction: Why Self-Help Is Not Enough
In these pages, Brennan describes a turning moment in his life, a moment in which he spent some three hours lost in a powerful, silent, spiritual terra incognita once described by Mircea Eliade as the Golden World. I have known Brennan for many years, but I never heard that story until now.
My own experience of the Golden World began with hearing Brennan speak for about ten minutes once. I arrived late, did not know who he was, and snuck out the back twenty minutes before the end, stunned by a single story he told. All these years later I can still hear him—“The Father is very, very fond of me.” The experience ended three hours later, with me still unable to speak, Brennan’s hands on my shoulders calling me by name though we had never met and my name badge was in my pocket. Like him, I have never told anyone what I heard in my heart that day, but it has made all the difference in my life.
But it is in these pages that I found many things we shared without my knowing it.
It turns out that we both love the Yankees of New York and the eateries of New Orleans. We both discovered the poet James Kavanaugh in his prime and stumbled into Carlo Carretto before Carretto became one of the most famous unknown monks in the world. We each hold one of our grandfathers in high regard simply because they were smart