All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [6]
Probably a man’s destination colors the highway, enlarges or diminishes its defects. Gliding over the tar, I was on my way home. DeVoto, traveling the same route, was on his way to what he described rather warily as “professional commitments,” by which he probably meant that he was on his way somewhere to make a speech or get a degree. Steering a car toward home is a very different experience from steering a car toward a rostrum, and if our findings differ, it is not that we differed greatly in powers of observation but that we were headed in different emotional directions.2
Over the tar of my life, I have usually been headed toward something along the lines of “professional commitments.” Or at least I thought they were. But those trips are over now. I am living in a different emotional direction. I am steering toward home, hardly a poster child for anything … anything, that is, but grace. And what exactly is grace? These pages are my final words on the matter. Grace is everything. I am Brennan the witness.
Tout est Grâce,
Brennan
Notes
1 Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Memoir (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 32–33.
2 E. B. White, Essays of E. B. White (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), 8.
Part I
RICHARD
1
You don’t always get what you ask for. I expect most children have heard that line in one way or another. It’s a difficult lesson to learn, yet it’s one that is essential to growing up. But when I heard my mother, Amy Manning, say that, I knew she wasn’t talking about something petty like a ball glove or a doll. She was speaking about something much deeper.
My mother had prayed for a girl. What she got on April 27, 1934, was a boy, me, Richard Manning. My name has not always been Brennan.
It was the Great Depression in Brooklyn. My brother, Robert, had been born just fifteen months earlier. Over the years, I’ve seen many mothers grin and talk about a second child born so quickly on the heels of the first as “my little surprise.” But not my mother, not back then. To her, I was one more disappointment, one more unanswered prayer.
My mother was born in Montreal, Canada. At the age of three, both of her parents died within six days of each other in a flu epidemic that swept the city, killing thousands. Those were days when the bedtime prayer “If I should die before I wake” actually had teeth. There was no one to take her in, so my mother was sent to an orphanage. Her stay lasted ten years. God only knows what happened to her in that time. I’ve wondered if anyone was there to help a three-year-old grieve? Did anyone remember to celebrate her birthday? Did they even know her birthday? What about Christmas—were there gifts for her? Who were the adult females behind those walls and what kinds of mothering impressions, if any, did they make on her? And what about the men? Was my mother abused? Raped? All of this and more are probabilities for that bruised decade of my mother’s life. But my questions have no answers because what happened there stayed there. Then again, maybe she would have answered my questions in the same way she answered so many others: You don’t always get what you ask for.
When she was thirteen, my mother was adopted by a man known as Black George McDonald. Why he adopted her, or any of the details surrounding the adoption, I do not know; I do know that his name sounds like it came straight out of a novel. I’ve been told that he had made some discoveries of gold and was involved with building the town of Alexandria, between Montreal and Toronto. So Black George evidently had financial means, but I don’t know his intentions. He must have had some kindness, however, because my mother wanted to become a nurse and he funded her nursing education. His gift led her to Brooklyn, where she completed her nurse’s training, met and married my father, birthed my brother, prayed for a girl, and got me. Although you can clearly deduce that knowing of my mother’s disappointment over my birth is painful for me, I have nonetheless committed to try to express gratitude in these pages.