All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [38]
The men, minus me, gathered this past August 2010 in Vail, Colorado, marking yet “one more time.” So how many years is that now? We can’t remember, and we don’t care. It’s interesting for me to think about this group now. I had spent time in the Marines with other soldiers, time in monasteries among monks, and time among uncloistered brothers serving the poor. The Notorious Sinners are a strange mixture of the best aspects of all those prior experiences.
The format for our time together has changed only a little over the years. It continues to be a safe place for a group of men to open our hearts to one another, listen, pray, and celebrate Communion. In the best sense of the word—sanctuary. In no way do I want to give the impression that every year was some mystical, miracle-heavy experience. There were hard years, times when my alcoholism and an alcoholic’s behaviors became the sun around which everything else revolved and sometimes got scorched. I am not proud of those times, but they occurred nonetheless.
The Notorious Sinners: Back: Bob Stewart, Alan Hubbard, me, Paul Sheldon, Devlin Donaldson, Fil Anderson, John Krahm, Paul Johnston, John Peter Smith
Front: Mickey Elfers, Mike Yaconelli
Author Stephen King once said,
Without unvarnished, tough-love truth-telling from their own kind—the voices that say, “You’re lying about that, Freckles”—the addict has a tendency to fall back into his old ways. And the chief old way … is lying through one’s teeth.2
Several of my good friends, men of my own kind, confronted me over the years about my lying. It wasn’t so much the lies about the big things as the lies about the little stuff, the need to lie at all. Why does an alcoholic lie about the petty? To stay in practice. Alcoholism isn’t called “the Liar’s Disease” for nothing.
Those confrontations never went well. I only wish I could have trusted then what I believe now. There’s not a chance those confrontations ever came from a place of malice; they were always rooted in love. However, I always heard their words as criticism, and as such, I reacted in defensive anger. For me, the anger was simply a mask, a mask for fear. I dimly suspected that then, but I can confess it now.
My health has kept me from meeting with the Sinners these last few years. But I have been encouraged that they have continued to gather on their own and open their hearts and listen and pray and celebrate Communion, one more time. They have grown beyond me, a bittersweet reality. A number of the men have visited me lately and told me of the continued faithfulness of the Notorious Sinners. Those stories have brought me sheer joy.
I was deeply moved years ago when reading Robert Johnson’s memoir Balancing Heaven and Earth. One of the passages I marked heavily with asterisks recounts the contents of a vivid dream Johnson experienced one night. I included that passage in my book Ruthless Trust. I believe these words are now a fitting, living tribute to my good friends. Some have criticized that the passage breaks all rules of orthodoxy. It’s probably helpful to know that one of the rules of the Sinners has always been “There are no rules.”
A prosecutor presented all of the sins of commission and omission that I was responsible for throughout my life, and the list was very long indeed. That went on for hours, and it fell on me like a landslide. I was feeling worse and worse to the point where the soles of my feet were hot. After hours of accusations from the prosecution, a group of angels appeared to conduct my defense. All they could say was, “But he loved.” They began chanting this over and over again in a chorus: “But he loved. But he loved. But he