All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir

What people are saying about …

All Is Grace

Brennan’s memoir is at once unvarnished and confessional, grippingly honest and poignantly tender. An unguarded peek into a life marked by foibles and blessings, gifts and pain, joy and regret. But always, in every paragraph, grace. Brennan has lived it, experienced it, and grasps the extraordinary power of God’s great gift.

Max Lucado, pastor and best-selling author

"For as long as I’ve known him, Brennan Manning has acknowledged that his life is a bundle of paradoxes. By revealing more of his story in his final written work, he strains to convince us that he was telling the truth. Focusing on his shameful flaws and God’s incomprehensible grace, this firebrand preacher cries again the message that he’s proclaimed for over forty years, that, whether or not you choose to believe it, All Is Grace."

Fil Anderson, author of Running on Empty and Breaking the Rules

Brennan Manning has touched many lives, mine included. This poignant memoir reaffirms his truthful message that weakness and failure are not things to be despised but well-lit paths straight into the arms of our Lord.

Ashley Cleveland, three-time Grammy-award winner

Brennan has always woven bits and pieces of his life’s story into his sermons and books. Here, at last, he shares the entire hurtful, redemptive story.

Michael Card, musician and Bible teacher

Brennan has done it again, offering us a deeply personal book that deals with the brutal honesty of his life’s failures and the grace so many fear. It is truly beautiful.

Jay Bakker, copastor of Revolution NYC and author of Fall to Grace and Son of a Preacher Man

I count myself among the scores who have been touched by Brennan’s life message. He saw life in me when I felt dead, and he was moved by goodness in me when I was bad. Through Brennan, grace is now more real to me. This memoir will make it more real for you.

Dr. Larry Crabb, psychologist, spiritual director, and author of Inside Out, Shattered Dreams, and 66 Love Letters

"While it may very well be Brennan Manning’s parting word to us, All Is Grace is no deathbed confession. In these soul-stirring pages, Brennan testifies once again of a stubborn, messy grace that does not cleanse us as much as it stains us and marks us forever as one precious to the Most High God. As the old hymn says: Some through the water, some the floods, some through the fire, but all through the blood … God leads His dear children along. And, as Brennan shows us in All Is Grace, God leads us when we stumble facedown too. All Is Grace is the book for all who stumble."

Karen Spears Zacharias, author of Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide?

Brennan once shared with me that you can’t compare your insides with everyone else’s outsides. This book is a brutally honest look ‘behind the curtain’ at the man many consider the wizard of spirituality. Whether you’re just starting on a spiritual journey or you’re on the national speaking circuit, this book is a must-read. I guarantee you’ll gain perspective about the pitfalls, the joys, and the ultimate reality of grace in a ragamuffin world.

Spencer Burke, author, creator of TheOOZE.com, and director of MissionPlanting.com

This is the bittersweet tale of a great sinner whose appetite for personal destruction is only just eclipsed by his hunger for God. Brennan’s transparency is a sweet gift to all who struggle to measure up, or cover up, and a witness to the strength and spaciousness of grace.

Greg Paul, author of The Twenty-Piece Shuffle and Close Enough to Hear God Breathe

ALL IS GRACE

Published by David C Cook

4050 Lee Vance View

Colorado Springs, CO 80918 U.S.A.

David C Cook Distribution Canada

55 Woodslee Avenue, Paris, Ontario, Canada N3L 3E5

David C Cook U.K., Kingsway Communications

Eastbourne, East Sussex BN23 6NT, England

David C Cook and the graphic circle C logo

are registered trademarks of Cook Communications Ministries.

All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes,

no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form

without written permission from the publisher.

The website addresses recommended throughout this book are offered as a resource to you. These websites are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement on the part of David C Cook, nor do we vouch for their content.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the Jerusalem Bible, copyright © 1966 by Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd. and Doubleday & Co., a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Reprinted by permission. Scripture quotations marked NEB are from The New English Bible, Copyright © 1961 Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

Photos courtesy of Art and Geraldine Rubino,

Roslyn Bourgeois, John Krahm, and Rick Christian

LCCN 2011933706

Hardcover ISBN 978-1-4347-6418-8

International Trade Paperback ISBN 978-0-7814-0616-1

eISBN 978-0-7814-0785-4

© 2011 Brennan Manning

Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200,

Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.

The Team: Don Pape, Nicci Jordan Hubert, Amy Konyndyk, Nick Lee, Jack Campbell, Karen Athen

Cover Design: Gearbox

Cover Photo: Ben Pearson

First Edition 2011

for Roslyn

Contents

Foreword by Philip Yancey

Reader Testimonies

A Word Before

Introduction

Part I: Richard

Part II: Brennan

Part III: Me

A Word After

Photo Gallery

Letters

Acknowledgments

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 Brennan’s 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 doesn’t disclose in these pages). Our backgrounds could hardly have been more different—Southern fundamentalism versus Northeastern Catholic—and 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 Brennan’s 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 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. (John Bunyan, after all, titled his own spiritual biography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.)

At one point Brennan likens himself to Samson, that flawed superman whom God somehow found a way to use right up to the day of his death. Reading such stories in the Old Testament, I’ve come up with a simple principle to explain how God can use the likes of such imperfect men and women: God uses the talent pool available. Again and again, Brennan made himself available. In the last few years, nearly blind, subject to illness and falls, at an age when he should have been enjoying retirement on a beach in Florida, he kept getting on airplanes and flying places to proclaim a gospel he believes with all his heart but has not always lived.

A wealthy man in Denver, having heard Brennan’s powerful delivery at a local church, invited him to lead a weeklong retreat for a group of eight handpicked friends, including me. When Brennan announced the retreat would be silent, the benefactor was not happy: I bring him all the way up here to learn from his expertise, and he wants us to keep silent! Yet each of us had an hour a day of personal time with Brennan, a compressed time of spiritual direction after meditating on writings and Bible passages he gave us. Brennan worked hard all day while most of the time we sat in the fields or in our rooms and meditated.

Since the camp where we were staying had inadequate facilities, we went each evening to the nearest restaurant, a fancy Chart House. The first night Brennan brought along a boom box with cassette tapes of Rich Mullins and John Michael Talbot, proposing that during dinner we listen to meditative music and continue our time of silence. Soon a chipper waitress showed up. Hi, guys, how are we all doing tonight? No response came except for nods and a few tight smiles. A fellow diner recognized one of our group and came over to chat. Patrons at tables around us stared disapprovingly at the boom box, which was pumping out music that blatantly clashed with the restaurant’s own Muzak. Brennan laughed, threw up his hands, and made a new rule: silence suspended during evening dinner.

I remember that comical scene when I think of Brennan. More than anyone I know, truly, he has sought a pure and holy life, to the extent of living in a cave in Spain for months, working side by side with the poor, taking vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Yet his ideals flounder. Other noises—the clink of wine glasses, laughter from the bar, a woman’s voice, distractions from others … in short, the messiness of life—keep interfering with his holy quest. And the inner demons, which no one who has not experienced them can understand, rise up and take control.

All is grace, Brennan concludes, looking back on a rich but stained life. He has placed his trust in that foundational truth of the universe, which he has proclaimed faithfully and eloquently.

As a writer, I live in daily awareness of how much easier it is to edit a book than edit a life. When I write about what I believe and how I should live, it sounds neat and orderly. When I try to live it out, all hell breaks loose. Reading Brennan’s memoir, I see something of the reverse pattern. By focusing on the flaws, he leaves out many of the triumphs. I keep wanting him to tell the stories that put him in a good light, and there are many. Choosing full disclosure in a narrative that might burnish his reputation, Brennan presents himself as the apostle Paul once did, as a clay jar, a disposable container made of baked dirt. We must look to his other books for a full picture of the treasure that lies inside.

A poem by Leonard Cohen says it well:

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

Philip Yancey

Reader Testimonies

Have you wondered why God doesn’t make your life work or why you can’t make your life work? I think we read memoirs hoping that someone has found an answer in his