Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God

by Brennan Manning

The underlying premise of this book: the splendor of a human heart which trusts that it is loved gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, the sight of ten thousand butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom. Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.

Unwavering trust is a rare and precious thing because it often demands a degree of courage that borders on the heroic. When the shadow of Jesus’ cross falls across our lives in the form of failure, rejection, abandonment, betrayal, unemployment, loneliness, depression, the loss of a loved one; when we are deaf to everything but the shriek of our own pain; when the world around us suddenly seems a hostile, menacing place—at those times we may cry out in anguish, “How could a loving God permit this to happen?” At such moments the seeds of distrust are sown. It requires heroic courage to trust in the love of God no matter what happens to us.

childlike surrender in trust is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship. And I would add that the supreme need in most of our lives is often the most overlooked—namely, the need for an uncompromising trust in the love of God. Furthermore, I would say that, while there are times when it is good to go to God as might a ragged beggar to the King of kings, it is vastly superior to approach God as a little child would approach his or her papa.

In first-century Palestine the question dominating religious discussion was, How do we hasten the advent of the Kingdom of God? Jesus proposed a single way: the way of trust. He never asked his disciples to trust in God. Rather, he demanded of them bluntly, “Trust in God and trust in me” (John 14:1). Trust was not some feature out at the edges of Jesus” teaching; it was its heart and center. This and only this would bring on speedily the reign of God.

We often presume that trust will dispel the confusion, illuminate the darkness, vanquish the uncertainty, and redeem the times. But the crowd of witnesses in Hebrews 11 testifies that this is not the case. Our trust does not bring final clarity on this earth. It does not still the chaos or dull the pain or provide a crutch. When all else is unclear, the heart of trust says, as Jesus did on the cross, “Into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). If we could free ourselves from the temptation to make faith a mindless assent to a dusty pawnshop of doctrinal beliefs, we would discover with alarm that the essence of biblical faith lies in trusting God. And, as Marcus Borg has noted, “The first is a matter of the head, the second a matter of the heart. The first can leave us unchanged, the second intrinsically brings change.”

The faith that animates the Christian community is less a matter of believing in the existence of God than a practical trust in his loving care under whatever pressure. The stakes here are enormous, for I have not said in my heart, “God exists,” until I have said, “I trust you.” The first assertion is rational, abstract, a matter perhaps of natural theology, the mind laboring at its logic. The second is “communion, bread on the tongue from an unseen hand.”4 Against insurmountable obstacles and without a clue as to the outcome, the trusting heart says, “Abba, I surrender my will and my life to you without any reservation and with boundless confidence, for you are my loving Father.”

The heart converted from mistrust to trust in the irreversible forgiveness of Jesus Christ is redeemed from the corrosive power of fear. The existential dread that salvation is reserved solely for the proper and pious, the nameless fear that we are predestined to backslide, the brooding pessimism that the good news of God’s love is simply wishful thinking—all these combine to weave a thin membrane of distrust that keeps us in a chronic state of anxiety.

The decisive (or what I call the second) conversion from mistrust to trust—a conversion that must be renewed daily—is the moment of sovereign deliverance from the warehouse of worry. So life-changing is this ultimate act of confidence in the acceptance of Jesus Christ that it can properly be called the hour of salvation. So often what is notoriously missing from the external, mechanized concept of salvation is self-acceptance, an experience that is internally personalized and rooted in the acceptance of Jesus Christ. It bids good riddance to unhealthy guilt, shame, remorse, and self-hatred. Anything less—self-rejection in any form—is a manifest sign of a lack of trust in the total sufficiency of Jesus’ saving work. Has he set me free from fear of the Father and dislike of myself, or has he not? The grace-laden act of trust is the landmark decision of life outside of which nothing has value and inside of which every relationship and achievement, every success and failure derives its final meaning. Unbounded trust in the merciful love of the redeeming God deals a mortal blow to skepticism, cynicism, self-condemnation, and despair. It is our decisive YES to Christ’s command, “Trust in God and trust in me.”

In the arc of my unremarkable life, wherein the victories have been small and personal, the trials fairly pedestrian, and the failures large enough to deeply wound me and those I love, I have repeated endlessly the pattern of falling down and getting up, falling down and getting up. Each time I fall, I am propelled to renew my efforts by a blind trust in the forgiveness of my sins from sheer grace, in the acquittal, vindication, and justification of my ragged journey based not on any good deeds I have done (the approach taken by the Pharisee in the temple) but on an unflagging trust in the love of a gracious and merciful God.

The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of a pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.

Take your human feelings, multiply them exponentially into infinity, and you will have a hint of the love of God revealed by and in Jesus Christ. With a strong affirmation of our goodness and a gentle understanding of our weakness, God is loving us—you and me—this moment, just as we are and not as we should be. There is nothing any of us can do to increase his love for us and nothing we can do to diminish it.

When we get waylaid from our walk with God by busyness, depression, family problems, or worse, God does not abandon us. Nor, if we walk the way of trust, do we abandon God. When we wander off the path, that trust pulls us back; and we do not flinch, hesitate, or worry about being unwelcome in the Father’s arms. No matter where we are on the journey, we have a quiet confidence that our trust in God’s love gives God immense pleasure.

if we picture God as touchy, unapproachable, and easily annoyed, if we image God as haughty, indifferent, or angry, if we invest him with unlovable qualities and cringe before his glance, we will dismiss the way of trust as a chimera, a cul-de-sac, or a soft, easy path for wimps and wusses. Our skepticism, cynicism, or triumphant rationalism will banish the Beyond-in-ou...

While the gravity of sin is not to be minimized, wasting time deploring the past keeps God at a distance. As the second-century shepherd of Hermas said, “Stop harping on your sins and pray for righteousness.”

darkness. A person should not act impulsively, of course. A careful discernment process involving family, friends, and a spiritual mentor should precede every major decision. But when the appropriate time comes, only the disciple with an unflinching trust in God will dare to risk. And that trust is not naïve; it knows that the possibility of making a mistake and getting hurt is very real. But without exposure to potential failure, there is no risk.

Naturally, the risk-takers are unnerving to the palace guards, who are threatened by anyone who trusts in God rather than the law. The latter tend to despise men and women who are not as cautious as they. They elevate themselves above the sinner and the nonconformist. Because of this reliance on self, coupled with a lack of self-knowledge, the legalists render themselves incapable of receiving grace; they do not and dare not live by trust in a loving God. They shake their heads, invoke hallowed traditions, and gratuitously employ their most potent and cruel weapon: guilt-tripping. Threatened by the freedom of anyone who trusts in God rather than the law, legalists warn of dire consequences and howl like a wolf pack in the night. The disciple, however, no longer plagued by the desire to please others and valuing God’s approval more than the disapproval of humans, moves on with eyes fixed on Jesus, “the author and pioneer of our trust” (Heb. 12:2).

The foremost quality of a trusting disciple is gratefulness. Gratitude arises from the lived perception, evaluation, and acceptance of all of life as grace—as an undeserved and unearned gift from the Father’s hand. Such recognition is itself the work of grace, and acceptance of the gift is implicitly an acknowledgment of the Giver.

Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar states, “We need only to know who and what we really are to break into spontaneous praise and thanksgiving.” Scarred and screwed-up though we are, an appreciation of our greatness as Abba’s beloved child, vibrantly alive in Christ Jesus, overcomes the sleazy sense of our seedy self and elicits the grateful exclamation, “I thank you, Lord, for the wonder of myself” (Ps. 139:14).

Was the primal sin of Adam and Eve ingratitude? Is it possible that God is more interested in the gratitude of our hearts than in anything else? The parable of the ten lepers (Luke 16:11–19) lends support to this surmise.

The Pharisee of the temple (Luke 18:9–14) on the other hand, is estranged from the spirit of gratefulness. He is indignant that Jesus would care about sinners, incensed that he would befriend the rabble. The prime fault of this Pharisee, a self-righteous man who condemns sinners as unrighteous, is his belief in his faultlessness. Conscious of his religiosity, he expresses thanks only for what he has and is; he is blinded to what he has not and is not. What Jesus says, in effect, to this enemy of the gospel of grace is this: These people you despise are real sinners not because they missed their morning meditation but because their professions have debased them, lust and greed have ensnared them. However, they have sincerely repented and now have what you lack—a deep gratitude to God for his mercy and goodness. Underlying every cry of the grateful sinner is an unshaken trust in the person and promise of Jesus. Jesus’ parables of the sheer gratuity of grace rustle like refreshing rain on the parched ground of pharisaical piety, sweep like a wild storm into the glum corners of sentimental hallelujah religion, and vibrate like sharp lightning in the sulfurous atmosphere of legalists hell-bent on nonhistorical orthodoxy.

TO WALK IN GRATITUDE is a way of living that is inclusive, attentive, contagious, and theocentric.

When we are inwardly dissipated through busyness, obsession, addiction, mindlessness, and preoccupation with television, sports, gossip, movies, shallow reading, and so forth, we cannot be attentive to the gifts that arrive each day.

As Brother David Steindl-Rast notes, “The root of joy is gratefulness…. It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”

The opposite of gratitude is, of course, ingratitude. So grievous was the matter of ingratitude in the mind of Ignatius of Loyola that he wrote a letter to Simon Rodriguez stating, It seems to me in the light of the Divine Goodness … that ingratitude is the most abominable of sins and that it should be detested in the sight of our Creator and Lord and by all of His creatures who are capable of enjoying His divine and everlasting glory. For it is a forgetting of the graces, benefits and blessings received…. On the contrary, the grateful acknowledgement of blessings and gifts received is loved and esteemed not only on earth but in heaven.

TO BE GRATEFUL for an unanswered prayer, to give thanks in a state of interior desolation, to trust in the love of God in the face of the marvels, cruel circumstances, obscenities, and commonplaces of life is to whisper a doxology in darkness.

The ubiquitous presence of pain and suffering—unwanted, apparently undeserved, and not amenable to explanation or remedy—poses an enormous obstacle to unfailing trust in the infinite goodness of God. How does one dare to propose the way of trust in the face of raw, undifferentiated heartache, cosmic disorder, and the terror of history? Any Christian writer who ignores these grim realities or dismisses them as inconsequential is either naïve, dishonest, or disconnected from the trust-busting anguish of many struggling seekers and believers.

As Louis Dupré writes, “The sheer magnitude of evil that our age has witnessed in death camps, nuclear warfare and internecine tribal or racial conflicts has not raised the question how can God tolerate so much evil, but rather how the more tangible reality of evil still allows the possibility of God’s existence.”2 Pain, suffering, and evil constitute a watershed for the community of faith. Many evade the question entirely, while others attempt to substitute art, rational reflection, or philosophical speculation for guttering religious trust. Indeed, as Dupré notes, “Evil invites philosophical speculation, yet it is the cliff on which philosophy suffers shipwreck.”3 Even theology cannot provide a fix for the mother whose tiny child has just died of cancer.

In the Bible, kabōd is a rich and complex theological concept with multiple shades of meaning. Starting with the Old Testament, the first and most primitive meaning is the weight of an object, its heaviness as determined on a scale. A second meaning, also found in the Old Testament, refers to material wealth. Solomon’s dream at Gibeon holds this promise: “What you have not asked I shall give you too,” said Yahweh, “such riches and glory [kabōd] as no other king ever had” (1 Kings 3:13). As part of that second meaning, the word is also used in a figurative sense, to describe someone who has achieved rank, status, prominence, power (Gen. 31:1). Even today, in American argot, we might say, of one who has attained success in career and business, “He’s heavy, man.” In a later period, the Jewish community identified kabōd with “the ‘weight,’ greatness, eminence, power and authority of God.”1 The awesome majesty of God is manifested in the magnalia Dei.

When Victor Hugo described God as “a divine and terrible radiance,” he used the word terrible not to indicate something frightening or dreadful but to imply an experience that attached a degree of unbearable intensity. In that phrase, Hugo caught not only the core meaning of kabōd, but the truth contained in an old Jewish epigram that says, “God is not a kindly old uncle, he is an earthquake.”4 No human being can withstand the effulgence of kabōd. Thus, the glory of God conveys the sense of a deep and dazzling darkness. Moses’ request to see the kabōd Yahweh is denied. He is told to cover his face while the glory passes, watching only as God departs: “I will make all my splendor [kabōd] pass before you,” says Yahweh, “and in your presence I will pronounce my name…. You cannot see my face, for no one sees me and still lives.” Yahweh also says, “Here is a place beside me. You must stand on the rock, and when my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with my hand as I pass by. Then I will take my hand away and you shall see the back of me, but my face is not to be seen” (Exod. 33:18–23).

The magnificent theme of kabōd reaches its culmination in the Christian scriptures, as the kabōd rests on the person of Jesus and he shares in the luminous brilliance of his Father. He is the Light who has come into the world. To glorify Jesus is to confess his divinity as well as his humanity. In short, Jesus is God. The carpenter who walked the dusty roads of Galilee is “one who has been tempted in every way that we are, though he’s without sin” (Heb 4:15); he is also, as the Nicene Creed stipulates, God from God, Light from Light, Kabōd from Kabōd, true God from true God, eternally begotten not made, one in being with the Father. He is more than a superior human being with an intellect keener than ours and a capacity for loving greater than ours. In his divinity Jesus is inexpressibly Other, absolutely incomparable. Jesus is the power and wisdom and holiness of God Almighty. “In him all things were created in heaven and earth” (Col. 1:6). He is creatively present 264 trillion miles from earth on the star Upsilon Andromedae. No thought can contain him; no word can express him. He transcends all human concepts, considerations, and expectations. He is the Beyond-in-our-midst, and though in our midst, still beyond anything we can intellectualize or imagine.

Jesus Christ will always be a scandal to the murky, immodest theory-making of the intelligentsia, because he cannot be comprehended by the rational, scientific, and finite mind.

The more we let go of our concepts and images, which always limit God, the bigger God grows and the more we approach the mystery of his indefinability. When we overlook the dissimilarity, we begin to speak with obnoxious familiarity about the Holy, make ludicrous comments such as “I could never imagine God doing such a thing,” calmly predict Armageddon, glibly proclaim infallible discernment of the will of God, and trivialize God, trimming the claws of the Lion of Judah.

mystery is an embarrassment to the modern mind. All that is elusive, enigmatic, hard to grasp will eventually yield to our intellectual investigation, then to our conclusive categorization—or so we would like to think. But to avoid mystery is to avoid the only God worthy of worship, honor, and praise. And it is a failure to slake the thirst of seekers and believers alike—those who reject the dignified, businesslike Rotary Club deity we chatter about on Sunday morning and search for a God worthy of awe, silent reverence, total commitment, and wholehearted trust.

Pundits have long maintained that the only person more arrogant than a newly certified physician is a newly ordained priest. At the age of twenty-nine, with the holy oils of ordination still wet on my hands, I sallied forth to teach theology at the university level. Exuding a brisk air of professional enthusiasm and a suffocating spirit of hubris, I expostulated so brilliantly on the mystery of God that after one semester, there was no mystery left. When I heard an elderly and saintly friar in the monastery comment, “The older I get, the less I understand about God,” I assumed that it was his sincere attempt at modesty. Secretly, however, I pitied his shallowness. Looking back now, I shudder at my “profundity.”

The human tendency toward projection—ascribing to God our thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about ourselves and others—is unmasked in all its absurdity. Distorted images and caricatures of God as vengeful, whimsical, fickle, and punitive (images that cannot fail to engender anxiety, fear, scrupulosity, and unhealthy guilt) are exposed for what they are—puny and pathetic human constructs. The same judgment is passed on the illusion of control. When life is tranquil, relationships intact, finances secure, and physical health flourishing; when the enemy is not at the gate; when the war drums are not rattling; when the Calvin Klein perfume advertisement for Eternity for Men seems plausible—then a sense of complacency, self-sufficiency, and personal command of one’s destiny deludes and lulls us. But the reality of kabōd shatters every delusion. As previous certainties desert us, we become vulnerable and open. The glory of God makes possible the primordial act of religion: the realization that we are not sufficient unto ourselves, that we have received our life and being from another. In a decision that reaches the roots of our most intimate self and demands the renunciation of belonging to that self, we freely ratify our condition as creatures. Through this fundamental act of dispossession we acknowledge the illusion of control and open ourselves to the reality of God.

Wrong thinking about God and people often begins with a debased image of ourselves. As we continue to confuse our perception of ourselves with the mystery that we really are, self-rejection is inevitable.

In a country degraded by blighted neighborhoods and ravaged landscapes, the spiritual visionaries quiet our cultivated fears and inspire trust by lifting our eyes to the extravagant beauty of God manifested in creation. In his commentary on Psalm 148, Augustine asks, “Does God proclaim Himself in the wonders of creation?” He then answers, “No. All things proclaim Him, all things speak. Their beauty is the voice by which they announce God, by which they sing, ‘It is you who made me beautiful, not me myself but you.’” The poets, singers, songwriters, novelists, musicians, clowns, and mystics enable the voices to creation to shout, “How beautiful is the One who made us!”

As a child, John Henry Newman imagined that behind every flower there lurked an angel who made it grow and blossom. Later in life, as the foremost theologian in England, he wrote, “The reality is more profound. It is God Himself who can be discovered in the beauty of sensible things.” Even Jesus marveled at the beauty surrounding him. “Look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them” (Matt. 6:28–29, The Message). Those who look beyond the literal see the world as a metaphor for God. When they direct us to the majesty of the mountains, the beauty of the prairies, the variety of wildflowers along the roadside, the smell of mint and hay on a summer morning, the rumble of a train through the valley, the sound of a waterfall, they birth the Word in our midst. They dare us to dream of our homeland, where eye has not seen, neither has ear heard, nor has the imagination conceived of the beauty that awaits us.

Parker Palmer notes: Too often the church is an enemy of our solitude. Too often the church is one more agent in the vast social conspiracy of togetherness and noise aimed at distracting us from encountering ourselves. The church keeps us busy on this cause or that, this committee or that, trying to provide meaning through motion until we get “burned out” instead and withdraw from the church’s life. Even in its core act of worship the church provides little space for the silent and solitary inward journey to occur (sometimes filling the available space with noisy exhortations to take that very journey!).

more contemplative quiet and listening. Self-absorption fades into self-forgetfulness, as we fix our gaze on the brightness of the Lord. In the words of Paul, “We are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him

Jesus assured us of two things: presence and promise. It is not tautologous to say the promise of his presence (“I’ll be with you every day of your life until your time runs out”) and the presence of his promise (Christ in you now and your hope of glory down the road). Jesus never guaranteed that we would be spared suffering or victimization by evil-doing; in fact, he said flatly, “In the world you will have trouble” (John 16:33). What he promised was that during our desolate hours there would be one set of footprints. In varying degrees, suffering and loss touch every life—as does the presence of God in Christ if we have faith in his presence and hope in his promise. In the midst of the ruins—in the premature death of a loved one, in the hell on earth we call a crack house, in the ache of heartbreak, in the sheer malevolence of Kosovo and Rwanda—the presence of God abides. The trusting disciple, often through clenched teeth, says, in effect, God is still trustworthy, but not because of unrestricted power to intervene on my behalf, he is trustworthy because of a promise given and sustained in Christian communities throughout generations.9 In the midst of tragic events that leave us bereft of understanding, trust does not demand explanations but turns to the One who promised, “I will not leave you orphans” (John 14:18). In the face of a pressing need for answers and solutions to life’s problems—answers that are not quickly forthcoming—trust in the Wisdom and Power who is Je...

The dogged fidelity of Jesus in the face of our indifference to his affection and our rampant ingratitude for his faithfulness—he is always faithful, for he cannot disown his own self (2 Tim. 2:11)—is a mystery of such mind-bending magnitude that the intellect buckles and theology bows in its presence.

people who have allowed me to enter the inner chamber of their hearts because they have been able to recognize Jesus hidden in me. And I shake my head in grateful surprise at the miracle of his grace at work in my ministry. Then I return to the motel, pack my bag, and go on to the next place. Along the highway I meet others who are companions for a time, since we are going in the same direction. When one of us takes an exit, without a word or a wave of farewell, we part company, never to see one another again. It is not a cause for grief or self-pity, but simply the nature of the itinerant lifestyle. At times, however, in some rare and gratuitous moment on the road, I meet someone and experience what can only be described as a moment of mutual recognition. With the passing of time, I develop a friendship with that person, and our desire to spend time together grows. When ministry calls me to return to that friend’s hometown or city, it would be unthinkable not to have dinner with him. Such a friend allows me to be myself, thoughtful one moment

A careful reading of the gospel message suggests that Jesus needs nothing but our humility and confidence to work miracles in us.

Our disappointments arise from presuming to know the outcome of a particular endeavor.

Real living is not about words, concepts, and abstractions but about experience of who or what is immediately before us. The self-forgetfulness that such experience requires is the essence of contemplative simplicity.

The good news is that the child within can be recovered. It can happen right now, with something as simple as giving a little one a piggyback ride or walking slowly down the street and listening to the music of what is happening. “Unless you change and become like little children …”(Matt. 18:3).

it may mean more to Jesus when we say, “I trust you,” than when we say, “I love you.”