Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

by Brennan Manning

The false self is frustrated because he never hears God’s voice. He cannot, since God sees no one there. Prayer is death to every identity that does not come from God.

Being the beloved is our identity, the core of our existence. It is not merely a lofty thought, an inspiring idea, or one name among many. It is the name by which God knows us and the way He relates to us.

This is the foundation of the true self. The indispensable condition for developing and maintaining the awareness of our belovedness is time alone with God. In solitude we tune out the naysaying whispers of our worthlessness and sink down into the mystery of our true self. Our longing to know who we really are—which is the source of all our discontent—will never be satisfied until we confront and accept our solitude.

How would you respond if I asked you this question: “Do you honestly believe God likes you, not just loves you because theologically God has to love you?” If you could answer with gut-level honesty, “Oh, yes, my Abba is very fond of me,” you would experience a serene compassion for yourself that approximates the meaning of tenderness.

Through meal sharing, preaching, teaching, and healing, Jesus acted out His understanding of the Father’s indiscriminate love—a love that causes His sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and His rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike (Matthew 5:45).

God calls His children to a countercultural lifestyle of forgiveness in a world that demands an eye for an eye—and worse. But if loving God is the first commandment, and loving our neighbor proves our love for God, and if it is easy to love those who love us, then loving our enemies must be the filial badge that identifies Abba’s children.

Understanding triggers the compassion that makes forgiveness possible.

The heartfelt compassion that hastens forgiveness matures when we discover why our enemy cries.

Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.

The way of tenderness avoids blind fanaticism. Instead, it seeks to see with penetrating clarity. The compassion of God in our hearts opens our eyes to the unique worth of each person. “The other is ‘ourself’; and we must love him in his sin as we were loved in our sin.”[11]

What is indiscriminate compassion? “Take a look at a rose. Is it possible for the rose to say, ‘I shall offer my fragrance to good people and withhold it from bad people’? Or can you imagine a lamp that withholds its rays from a wicked person who seeks to walk in its light? It could only do that by ceasing to be a lamp. And observe how helplessly and indiscriminately a tree gives its shade to everyone,

good and bad, young and old, high and low; to animals and humans and every living creature—even to the one who seeks to cut it down. This is the first quality of love—its indiscriminate character.”

What makes the kingdom come is heartfelt compassion: a way of tenderness that knows no frontiers, no labels, no compartmentalizing, and no sectarian divisions. Jesus, the human Face of God, invites us to deep reflection on the nature of true discipleship and the radical lifestyle of Abba’s child.

The pharisaic spirit flourishes today in those who use the authority of religion to control others, entangling them in unending spools of regulations, watching them struggle and refusing to assist.

If we continue to focus solely on the sinner/saint duality in our person and conduct, while ignoring the raging opposition between the pharisee and the child, spiritual growth will come to an abrupt standstill.

The child spontaneously expresses emotions; the pharisee carefully represses them.

We have spread so many ashes over the historical Jesus that we scarcely feel the glow of His presence anymore. He is a man in a way that we have forgotten men can be: truthful, blunt, emotional, nonmanipulative, sensitive, compassionate—His inner child so liberated that He did not feel it unmanly to cry. He met people head on and refused to cut any deal at the price of His integrity. The gospel portrait of the beloved Child of Abba is that of a man exquisitely attuned to His emotions and uninhibited in expressing them. The Son of Man did not scorn or reject feelings as fickle and unreliable. They were sensitive emotional antennae to which He listened carefully and through which He perceived the will of His Father for congruent speech and action.

Impressions form images that become fixed ideas that give birth to prejudices. Anthony De Mello said, “If you are prejudiced, you will see that person from the eye of that prejudice. In other words, you will cease to see this person as a person.”[12] The pharisee within spends most of his time reacting to labels, his own and others’.

Limiting the Resurrection either to the past or to the future makes the present risenness of Jesus largely irrelevant, safeguards us from interference with the ordinary rounds and daily routine of our lives, and preempts communion now with Jesus as a living person.

Christianity is not simply a message but an experience of faith that becomes a message, explicitly offering hope, freedom from bondage, and a new realm of possibility.

“The mystery is Christ among you, your hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). Hope knows that if great trials are avoided, great deeds remain undone, and the possibility of growth into greatness of soul is aborted. Pessimism and defeatism are never the fruit of the life-giving Spirit but rather reveal our unawareness of present risenness.

Contemplation is gazing at the unveiled glory of God in the risen glorified Christ. Contemplative prayer is above all else looking at the person of Jesus.[15] The prayer of simple awareness means we don’t have to get anywhere because we are already there. We are simply coming into consciousness that we possess what we seek. Contemplation, defined as looking at Jesus while loving Him, leads not only to intimacy but also to the transformation of the person contemplating.

Every time the Gospels mention that Jesus was moved with deep emotion for people, they show that it led Him to do something—physical or inner healing, deliverance or exorcism, feeding the hungry crowds or intercessory prayer. Above all, it moved Him to dispel distorted images of who He is and who God is, to lead people out of darkness into light. I’m reminded of this messianic prophecy of Isaiah: “He is like a shepherd feeding his flock, gathering lambs in his arms, holding them against his breast and leading to their rest the mother ewe” (40:11).

Our impulse to tell the salvation story arises from listening to the heartbeat of the risen Jesus within us. Telling the story does not require that we become ordained ministers or flamboyant street corner preachers, nor does it demand that we try to convert people by concussion with one sledgehammer blow of the Bible after another. It simply means we share with others what our lives used to be like, what happened when we met Jesus, and what our lives are like now.

It is one thing to discover the treasure and quite another to claim it as one’s own through ruthless determination and tenacious effort.

When we are not profoundly affected by the treasure in our grasp, apathy and mediocrity are inevitable. If passion is not to degenerate into nostalgia or sentimentality, it must renew itself at its source.

The recovery of passion begins with the recovery of my true self as the beloved. If I find Christ, I will find myself, and if I find my true self, I will find Him. This is the goal and purpose of our lives. John did not believe that Jesus was the most important thing; he believed that Jesus was the only thing. For “the disciple Jesus loved,” anything less was not genuine faith.

Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). The way He related to Peter, John, and Mary Magdalene is the way He relates to us. The recovery of passion starts with reappraising the value of the treasure, continues with letting the Great Rabbi hold us against His heart, and comes to fruition in a personal transformation of which we will not even be aware.

The one great passion in Jesus’ life was His Father. He carried a secret in His heart that made Him great and lonely.[4] The four evangelists do not spare us the brutal details of the losses Jesus suffered for the sake of integrity; the price He paid for fidelity to His passion, His person, and His mission. His own family thought He needed custodial care (Mark 3:21), He was called a glutton and a drunkard (Luke 7:34), the religious leaders suspected a demonic seizure (Mark 3:22), and bystanders called Him some bad names. He was spurned by those He loved, deemed a loser, driven out of town, and killed as a criminal.

Again, there is undeniable wisdom here. The tendency to construct a self-image based on performing religious acts easily leads to the illusion of self-righteousness. When our sense of self is tied to any particular task—such as serving in a soup kitchen, promoting environmental consciousness, or giving spiritual instruction—we take a functional approach to life; work becomes the central value; we lose touch with the true self and the happy combination of mysterious dignity and pompous dust which we really are.

Faith tells us that we are Abba’s beloved children. Faith persuades us of the present risenness of Jesus. But, as Sebastian Moore noted, “In religion there always lurks the fear that we invented the story of God’s love.”[9] Genuine faith leads to knowing the love of God, to confessing Jesus as Lord, and to being transformed by what we know.

To listen obediently to Jesus—“If I, then, the Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you should wash each other’s feet” (John 13:14)—is to hear the heartbeat of the Rabbi John knew and loved.

False prophets, playing on people’s innate fear of displeasing God, will abound in the coming years, leading people on wild pilgrimages and creating panic. As we listen to the heartbeat of the Rabbi, we will hear a word of reassurance: “I’ve told you all this beforehand. Shh! Be still. I am here. All is well.”

In place of end-times agitation and thoughts of doom, Jesus tells us to be alert and watchful. We are to avoid the doomsayer and the talk-show crank when they conduct their solemn televised meeting in the green room of the Apocalypse. We are to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8). We are to claim our belovedness each day and live as servants in the awareness of present risenness. We pay no heed to the quacks and self-proclaimed seers who manipulate the loyalty of others for their self-serving purposes.

The Christ within who is our hope of glory is not a matter of theological debate or philosophical speculation. He is not a hobby, a part-time project, a good theme for a book, or a last resort when all human effort fails. He is our life, the most real fact about us. He is the power and wisdom of God dwelling within us.

Those who stop short of evil in themselves will never know what love is about.[7] Unless and until we face our sanctimonious viciousness, we cannot grasp the meaning of the reconciliation Christ affected on Calvary’s hill.

When Jesus told us to love our enemies, He knew that His love operating in us could melt the hardened heart and make the enemy our friend. “This applies supremely,” H. A. Williams writes, “to the enemy within. For our own worst enemy is always ourselves. And if with patience and compassion I can love that murderous man, that cruel, callous man, that possessive, envious, jealous man, that malicious man who hates his fellows, that man who is me, then I am on the way to converting him into everything that is dynamically good and lovely and generous and kind and, above all, superabundantly alive with a life which is contagious.”

Those who wear bulletproof vests protecting themselves from failure, shipwreck, and heartbreak will never know what love is. The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi.

“Learning by heart” is another matter entirely. The rhythm of relentless tenderness in the Rabbi’s heart makes loving terribly personal, terribly immediate, and terribly urgent. He says, “I give you a new commandment; it is My commandment; it is all I command you: Love one another as I have loved you.” Only compassion and forgiveness count. Love is the key to everything. Living and loving are one.

Heart speaks to heart. The Rabbi implores, “Don’t you understand that discipleship is not about being right or being perfect or being efficient? It’s all about the way you live with each other.” In every encounter we either give life or we drain it. There is no neutral exchange. We enhance human dignity, or we diminish it. The success or failure of a given day is measured by the quality of our interest and compassion toward those around us. We define ourselves by our response to human need. The question is not how we feel about our neighbor but what we have done for him or her. We reveal our heart in the way we listen to a child, speak to the person who delivers mail, bear an injury, and share our resources with the indigent.

The vulnerability of God in permitting Himself to be affected by our response, the heartbreak of Jesus as He wept over Jerusalem for not receiving Him, are utterly astounding. Christianity consists primarily not in what we do for God but in what God does for us—the great, wondrous things that God dreamed up and achieved for us in Christ Jesus. When God comes streaming into our lives in the power of His Word, all He asks is that we be stunned and surprised, let our mouths hang open, and begin to breathe deeply.