Book Reflection: All Is Grace by Brennan Manning
If your life were to be summed up in a single sentence, what would it be? If you could encapsulate all that you have experienced, all that you have tried to pass on to your children and others, all that your life has been about in a few words, which would you choose?
How about these:
God loves me unconditionally, as I am and not as I should be.
Could that impossibility be true? It seems too good to be true, doesn’t it? It sounds so unfair, so unrestrained, so unqualified. It sounds so much like we are being let off the hook, given license, given permission to take the love of God for granted. It sounds so vulgar.
Appropriating the phrase from Robert Farrar Capon, Brennan Manning calls it vulgar grace. And vulgar grace has been the story of his life.
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I was first introduced to Brennan Manning in 1995 when I read The Ragamuffin Gospel. I don’t know how I heard of the book, but I devoured it. I can honestly say, of all the books I read in college, both those assigned and those I chose myself, no book was more formative for me than Manning’s classic. It spoke to something deep inside of me that longed to be loved and cared for. I had grown up with a distant and angry God who was looking for the best possible moment to expose my sin and destroy my life. The Ragamuffin Gospel painted a better picture of God – a God who loves me, no matter what – and that is the God I’ve been searching for ever since.
In his memoir All Is Grace, Brennan Manning shares the story of his a life, a story about how he has been searching for this God too.
The story starts, appropriately, with his mother, Amy, an orphan who ends up raising a family that is distant, untrusting, and more than a little harsh. In time, Brennan goes off to college, and then abruptly joins the Marines, and then abruptly becomes a Franciscan priest, and then abruptly joins the Little Brothers of Jesus in Europe, and then abruptly starts a new community in Mobile Alabama, and then abruptly …
You get the picture. Brennan’s life is full of fits and starts, new beginnings, new adventures, like he can’t sit still for any amount of time.
Eventually, he – somewhat less abruptly – leaves the priesthood to marry Roslyn, becoming in a moment a husband and father. Their story is touching and tragic. But this is not a happy-ever-after tale of a former Catholic priest turned Evangelical rockstar. It’s more vulgar than that.
Roslyn is not the love of Brennan’s life. Alcohol is.
With heartbreaking authenticity, Brennan shares about his lifelong struggle with alcohol. At times, it’s difficult to read. I don’t want to picture one of my spiritual heroes staggering about like Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. But that’s precisely the vulgar picture Brennan paints of himself. And in the midst of it, there is God, loving him unconditionally, as he is not as he should be.
It’s beautiful and heart-wrenching and inspiring and so very hopeful.
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Last year, I read The Pastor by Eugene Peterson. It is a wonderful memoir of a sweet and simple pastoral ministry. It made me long for the kind of gentle grace that is the hallmark of Peterson’s life and ministry.
All Is Grace is the other side of the same coin. Complicated and brash and void of any easy answers. It makes me long for the kind of vulgar grace that has sustained Brennan Manning all these years.
Vulgar. Messy. Angst-ridden. Full of failure and new hope. This is grace. Because this is life.
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