All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir

by Brennan Manning

As you read this memoir, you may be tempted, as I was, to think, Oh, what might have been … if Brennan hadn’t given in to drink. I urge you to reframe the thought to, Oh, what might have been … if Brennan hadn’t discovered grace. More than once I have watched this leprechaun of an Irish-Catholic hold spellbound an audience of thousands by telling in a new and personal way the story that all of us want to hear: that the Maker of all things loves and forgives us. Brennan knows well that love and especially the forgiveness. He may have left the platform that very night for a hotel room and drunk himself senseless. He admits in these pages to having broken all Ten Commandments several times over (murder, Brennan?). Each time he begged for forgiveness, repented to God and to his friends, and got up off the floor to keep walking. Like Christian, the everyman character in The Pilgrim’s Progress, he progressed not by always making right decisions but by responding appropriately to wrong ones.