Brennan Manning - Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffins Path to God

W HEN OUR CHILDREN were young I would sometimes rise early on a Saturday morning and fix them pancakes for breakfast. It was all great funthe broken eggs, the spilt milk, the batter and the chatter. They loved pancakeseven my pancakesand they would wolf them down quickly. I would often watch in astonishment at their greedy eating. Not once did I see either of them slipping a few pancakes under the table, stuffing them in their pockets thinking, I dont know about Dad. Maybe there wont be any pancakes tomorrow and so Id better get myself a little stash just in case. Not once did they ask me about the price of eggs or my ability to secure enough milk for tomorrow. No, as far as they were concerned there was an endless supply of pancakes. They lived, you see, in trust.

Trust is in short supply in our day. I have seen, for example, many a church with the word faith in its name: Faith Bible Chapel, Faith Community Church, Faith Ministries International. But I have yet to find a church with the word trust in the name. Trust, I say, is in short supply. It is for this reason that I welcome the perceptive thoughts of Brennan Manning on this often neglected but vital subject.

Manning ties the word ruthless to the word trustRuthless Trust. It is a juxtaposition that at first glance startles us, for ruthlessness refers to action that is without pity. But it is right here that we catch our first glimpse into Mannings ingenious approach to this topic, for by calling us to ruthless trust he is really standing against all the self-pity that plagues modern culture. He is calling us to a trust that stoutly refuses to regard self-interest as the highest good in life. This book, in fact, is a frontal attack on all the egocentric, hyphenated self-sins of our day: self-indulgence, self-will, self-service, self-aggrandizement, self-gratification, self-righteousness, self-sufficiency, and the like.

Manning calls this decisive movement into a radical trust in God a second conversion. And it is indeed. Conversion involves both a turning toward and a turning away. In our turning toward God we are learning to turn away from the world, the flesh and the Devil. We are also turning away from ourselves as the be-all and end-all of life, for we are slowly but surely realizing that God is truly the heart and center of all things.

I am so glad that Manning does not slide over the tragedies of our human existence easily in his eagerness to call us to a living trust in God. He is willing to face head-on the gnawing question we all feel deep inside: How does one dare to propose the way of trust in the face of raw, undifferentiated heartache, cosmic disorder and the terror of history? He even admits that these heart-wrenching realities of life often become the trust-busting anguish of many struggling seekers. Manning seeks not only to raise the question of the grim reality of evil but also to provide an answerto the extent that finite human beings can have an answer.

Now, I must not give away Mannings answer here: that I will leave for you to discover for yourself as you read and think and pray. But I will give you one hint. Look for his answer not so much in the didactic teaching as in the stories he tells. And Brennan Manning is a master story-teller. (As an aside, I very much like the way he is able to move effortlessly from stories of past centuries to stories of our day as if they comprise a seamless robeand so they do!) But be forewarned, Manning tells stories in the ancient way of wisdom teaching so that the answer is not predigested and obvious. No, you must search for yourself. His stories, like all good stories, require prayerful thought and reflection.

Ruthless Trust brings a timely message for our day. Even more, it calls us to a life that is for all time and eternity.

R ICHARD J. F OSTER

A LWAYS AND EVERYWHERE the overriding issue for the ragamuffin rabble is the person of Jesus Christ.

Who and what are the ragamuffins? The unsung assembly of saved sinners who are little in their own sight, conscious of their brokenness and powerlessness before God, and who cast themselves on his Mercy. Startled by the extravagant love of God, they do not require success, fame, wealth, or power to validate their worth. Their spirit transcends all distinctions between the powerful and powerless, educated and illiterate, billionaires and bag ladies, high-tech geeks and low-tech nerds, males and females, the circus and the sanctuary.

Here is a saying that you can rely on and nobody should doubt, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners (1 Tim. 1:15). Unglued and undone by personal experience of the Messiah of sinners, who searches the noisy streets of large cities and the unpaved roads of small hamlets, the ragamuffin walks the way of ruthless trust in the irreversible forgiveness of the Master. The defenses he has erected against his own truth as a saved sinner wither in the maelstrom of mercy flashing like lightning across his life.

If the Lord Jesus Christ has washed me in his own blood and forgiven all my sins, the ragamuffin whispers to herself, I cannot and must not refuse to forgive myself.

The ragamuffin resonates to the Pauline cry, I know who it is that I have put my trust in (2 Tim. 1:12). The felt knowledge of the tenderness of Jesus that lifts us, scarred and depressed after sin, gently to himself is the very soul of ragamuffin spirituality. After stumbling and falling, the ragamuffin does not sink into despondency and endless self-recrimination, she quickly repents, offers the broken moment to the Lord, and renews her trust in the Messiah of sinners. She knows that Jesus is comfortable with broken people who remember how to love.

Alert to the manipulations and machinations of Pharisaical self-righteousness, ragamuffins refuse to surrender control of their lives to rules and regulations. They see that the stale religiosity of legalists, trapped in the fatal narcissism of spiritual perfectionism, obscures the face of the God of Jesus. They will not barter their souls for the false security of fear-filled pieties that cripple the human spirit. The motto on the New Hampshire license plate, Live free or die, is the ragamuffin motto.

During the past three years of prayer, study, and soul-searching, the Holy Spirit has guided me to an inescapable conclusion: ruthless trust is the way for this ragamuffin. If it be your way, the sign you can trust will be the slow, steady, and miraculous transformation from self-rejection to self-acceptance rooted in the acceptance of Jesus Christ.

B RENNAN M ANNING
New Orleans
15 March 2000

T his book started writing itself with a remark from my spiritual director. Brennan, you dont need any more insights into the faith, he observed. Youve got enough insights to last you three hundred years. The most urgent need in your life is to trust what you have received.

That sounded simple enough. But his remark sparked a searing reexamination of my life, my ministry, and the authenticity of my relationship with Goda reexamination that spanned the next two years. The challenge to actually trust God forced me to deconstruct what I had spent my life constructing, to stop clutching what I was so afraid of losing, to question my personal investment in every word I had ever written or spoken about Jesus Christ and fearlessly to ask myself if I trusted him.