All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir

by Brennan Manning

think we read memoirs hoping that someone has found an answer in his or her own life that can make sense of ours.

one of my favorite books—The Diary of a Country Priest.

Ragamuffins have a singular prayer: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

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.…

the deals I made with myself to be a “good boy” cost me my voice, my sense of wonder, and my self-worth for most of my adult life.

I wish I could share more specific memories like this from my early childhood, but I can’t. I wish I could remember more words and phrases spoken by my parents or friends or teachers, but I can’t.

guess a good way to summarize my life from age six to sixteen was that it was a decade of doing what I could to be a good, obedient boy. I’m not particularly proud of that summary, that’s just the way it was.

You should know, however, that from this point on, you’d be wise to consider anything I say about alcohol to be suspect. It’s not that what I’m saying isn’t true; it’s that what I’m saying only scratches the surface.

Sometimes one sentence can stand up against years of hearing “He won’t amount to much.”

For a twenty-one-year-old about to set sail on a course for “pretty,” the dream was nothing short of troubling.

It’s hard to know too much when you’re in your early twenties, but I did know that I didn’t want to live the rest of my life only to be, as Goethe put it, “a troubled guest on the dark earth.”

I’ve written before that this was when I embarked on my search for God.

It was definitely a confusing time made even more difficult by my family’s inability to extend mercy or wisdom.

It was in those golden moments that I was battered by wave after wave of the theology of delight, that God not only loves me but also likes me. I was given a glimpse, an assurance that long ago we wound God’s clock for good. It was not that I found the more but rather the more found me. Christianity was not some moral code; it was a love affair, and I had experienced it firsthand.

After that day nothing has ever been the same. I wasn’t familiar with the verse then, but it is one I would come to claim and seek to live by, still to this day: There is only Christ: he is everything. Colossians 3:11

completed my undergraduate degree at St. Francis Seminary, with a major in philosophy and a minor in Latin, then spent a year in Washington, D.C., immersed in a spiritual-formation program, followed by four years of advanced theological study at the seminary.

Such was the case with the Franciscans. I was initially wooed by their life of complete and utter simplicity.

Little Brothers of Jesus. The fraternity is a place where brothers learn to pray together, and in light of the gospel, each man ruthlessly questions himself to discover the path God intends for his life.

I would be remiss to talk of the Little Brothers of Jesus without mentioning Charles de Foucauld, the founder of the order, who lived from 1858 to 1916.

A favorite book of mine is Carlo Carretto’s Letters from the Desert. He summed up well the call each of the Little Brothers responded to. It sounds quite personal because it was. Leave everything and come with me into the desert. It is not your acts and deeds that I want; I want your prayer, your love.2

That describes so much of my life: Learn it well and then leave it. My gut tells me that if someone asked Chouinard “Why?” he would answer as I would: There’s got to be more.

In that moment he said a powerful thing, a life-changing thing: “You are on the threshold of receiving the greatest grace of your life. You are discovering what it means to be poor in spirit. Brother Brennan, it’s okay not to be okay.”

All that is not the love of God has no meaning for me. I can truthfully say that I have no interest in anything but the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. If God wants it to, my life will be useful through my word and witness. If He wants it to, my life will bear fruit through my prayers and sacrifices. But the usefulness of my life is His concern, not mine. It would be indecent of me to worry about that.

I do know that his message to me—“It’s okay not to be okay”—was a seed that germinated in my later preaching ministry; in fact, it informed everything I wrote and spoke about for more than forty years.

Those were days when the Cursillo Movement was at its zenith, a precursor to the Charismatic Renewal in the Catholic Church. The cursillo, or “short course,” consisted of taking a group of people away from their normal environment to convey the best news, that Christ loves us, by the best means, friendship. It’s still going today and is usually a Thursday through Sunday retreat filled with talks on the essence of Catholic Christianity and the Eucharist. I

goal of cursillo is a living union with God.

My story up to this point has followed a loose chronology—one thing happening after the other. But for the rest of this section, time will loop, even fold over on itself.

I longed for the days like I’d experienced with the Little Brothers, a male camaraderie I knew could be a reality. So I sent an invitation out to a group of men who knew me but didn’t know one another, men with names like Paul and Alan and Devlin and Bob and Butch and John and Fil and Mickey and Mike and Gene and Ed and John and Lou and John Peter.

In terms of the dynamics of any relationship, if one person changes, the relationship changes; it is not the same as it was. No way it can be.

Tears are, unfortunately, not on the most-wanted list. But there are rare misty-eyed men who in the largesse of God’s grace happen to befriend us and reveal to us a different way of living, one fiercely tender and loyal.

In a wisdom that some days I admit feels foolish, God has ordained the later days of our lives to look shockingly similar to that of our earliest: as dependent children.

have said countless times that losing our illusions is difficult because illusions are the stuff we live by. We believe we’re invincible until cancer comes knocking, or we believe we’re making a comeback until we tumble down the stairs. God strips away those falsehoods because it is better to live naked in truth than clothed in fantasy.

Carlo Carretto wrote, “We are what we pray.” These are days of prayer without ceasing—“Help me! Have mercy on me!” And my Father, who is so very fond of me, does.

My desire is to witness, nothing else. My message, unchanged for more than fifty years, is this: God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be.

The trusting heart gives a second chance; it is forgiven and, in turn, forgives. I

suppose the preacher always preaches the message he needs most.

one of Brennan’s favorite Cajun words, lagniappe—compliments of the house. Grace.

The older you get, the more you sense that much of life is about timing.

We were the tired, poor, self-hating huddled masses yearning to be free, and along came a patchwork preacher who grinned and said, “You already are. Abba loves you. Let’s go get some chocolate ice cream.”

Today I recognize that if we are fortunate enough, there comes a time when we encounter someone who will leave an indelible mark on our life. Someone whose character embodies the fruits of a deep spiritual walk and whose intimacy with Jesus is so infectious that we long to emulate it. You have been that person in my life.

wrestled with why anyone would want to read a book about my life. I recently asked my friend (and cowriter) John this very question, and his reply was ‘Brennan, you trust that the crumb of grace will fall.’

It’s not that I hold that belief so much as that belief holds me.”