All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [5]
Saint Paul wrote to the Philippians of “forgetting all that lies behind.” A stark literalism here would render memoir a distraction at best. I do not believe that is what Paul intended. My experience has shown me that I all too often tend to deny that which lies behind, but as I still believe, that which is denied cannot be healed.
As Joan Didion once wrote, I want this memoir to put “a narrative line upon disparate images.” I’ve tried to unfold my story as it happened in time, to take you on the grand tour. Some memoirs are prosaic, the root of the word meaning “in a straight line.” But my story is less linear, more a circuitous pilgrimage of loops, lapses, hurrahs, and heartaches.
My story is a rosary, the beads of which are the people and experiences that have made me what I am. I have tried to move from one bead to the next, but my fingers are feeble and my eyes are tired. So please forgive me; you will experience gaps and breaks in time and will frequently want to know more. But this is not a tell-all. Sometimes I chose not to elaborate further, and other times I simply cannot remember any more. That’s the way it is. But with God’s and John’s help, this story is as true as I recall.
I have written about experiences with the straight-no-chaser grace of God, battered by wave upon wave of His tender fury. I have also experienced just as many, if not more, moments where Abba’s love was mediated, grace via the cloud of witnesses who have cast shadows on my bedraggled, beat-up, and burnt-out life. I have tried to honor those lives in this book. But either way all is well, grace is grace.
The book’s subtitle has a qualifier—A Ragamuffin Memoir. It’s best you know that going in. I fear that word has lost some of its original grit. Ragamuffins have a singular prayer: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Any additional flourishes to make that cry more palatable are pharisaical leaven. Warning: Mine has been anything but a straight shot, more like a crooked path filled with thorns and crows and vodka. Prone to wander? You bet. I’ve been a priest, then an ex-priest. Husband, then ex-husband. Amazed crowds one night and lied to friends the next. Drunk for years, sober for a season, then drunk again. I’ve been John the beloved, Peter the coward, and Thomas the doubter all before the waitress brought the check. I’ve shattered every one of the Ten Commandments six times Tuesday. And if you believe that last sentence was for dramatic effect, it wasn’t.
Buechner said it best:
I am inclined to believe that God’s chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time so that if we didn’t play those roles right the first time round, we can still have another go at it now.…
Another way of saying it, perhaps, is that memory makes it possible for us both to bless the past, even those parts of it that we have always felt cursed by, and also to be blessed by it … what the forgiveness of sins is all about.1
In his essay “Home-Coming,” E. B. White recounted a column written by Bernard DeVoto for Harper’s Magazine. The columnist had bemoaned a recent trip to the Maine coast, describing the highway into Maine as “overpopulated and full of drive-ins, diners, souvenir stands, purulent amusement parks, and cheap-Jack restaurants.” White had recently traveled the same route but experienced a completely different trip. Sure there were facade-ridden motor courts next to picturesque clapboard house-barn combinations and no shortage of opportunities to learn to spell moccasin while driving in, but there was also more. He saw birch and spruce and well-proportioned deer and the perfectly designed fox just there for the asking. But something played a key role in perception. White concluded,