All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir

by Brennan Manning

“If we don’t learn to transform the pain, we’ll transfer it.”

What was impossible to realize at the time was that I was shooting myself in the head in some strange time warp where the bullet takes many years to finally reach its target.

There is only Christ: he is everything. Colossians 3:11

“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.”

The Trappist monk Thomas Keating once said, “The cross Jesus asked you to carry is yourself. It’s all the pain inflicted on you in your past and all the pain you’ve inflicted on others.”

My mother had completely lost her memory. But I hadn’t. And my past with her created a core of pain in myself that I’d wrestled with most of my life.

If we really believe the gospel we proclaim, we’ll be honest about our own beauty and brokenness, and the beautiful broken One will make himself known to our neighbors through the chinks in our armor—and in theirs.

My life is a witness to vulgar grace—a grace that amazes as it offends. A grace that pays the eager beaver who works all day long the same wages as the grinning drunk who shows up at ten till five.

This vulgar grace is indiscriminate compassion.

It works without asking anything of us. It’s not cheap. It’s free, and as such will always be a banana peel for the orthodox foot and a fairy tale for the grown-up sensibility. Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try to find something or someone it cannot cover. Grace is enough. He is enough. Jesus is enough.

As I looked, I believe I finally saw my mother; she was a ragamuffin too. And all my resentment and anger fell away.

“You already are. Abba loves you. Let’s go get some chocolate ice cream.”