Brennan Manning - All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir

Contents

by Philip Yancey

Reader Testimonies

A Word Before

Part I: Richard

Part II: Brennan

Part III: Me

A Word After

Photo Gallery

FOREWORD

I first met Brennan Manning at an event called Greenbelt Festival in England, a sort of Christian Woodstock of artists, musicians, and speakers that had attracted twenty thousand fans to tents and impromptu venues set up in the muddy infield of a horse-racing track. Brennan seemed dazzled by the spectacle, and like a color commentator, kept trying to explain the subtleties of evangelicalism to his wife, Roslyn, a cradle Catholic who lacked Brennans experience with the subculture.

We did not see each other often over the years, but each time our paths crossed, we went deeper rather than tilling the same ground of friendship. When he visited a monastery in Colorado for spiritual retreats, he would sometimes get a temporary dispensation from the rule of silence and meet my wife and me at an ice-cream parlor (one addiction he doesnt disclose in these pages). Our backgrounds could hardly have been more differentSouthern fundamentalism versus Northeastern Catholicand yet by different routes we had both stumbled upon an artesian well of grace and have been gulping its waters ever since. One glorious fall afternoon we hiked on a carpet of golden aspen leaves along a mountain stream and I heard the details of Brennans life: his loveless childhood, his marathon search for God, his marriage and divorce, his lies and cover-ups, his continuing struggles with alcohol addiction.

As you read this memoir, you may be tempted, as I was, to think, Oh, what might have been if Brennan hadnt given in to drink. I urge you to reframe the thought to, Oh, what might have been if Brennan hadnt 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 Pilgrims Progress , he progressed not by always making right decisions but by responding appropriately to wrong ones. (John Bunyan, after all, titled his own spiritual biography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners .)