Quotes from Brennan Manning

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

I think we read memoirs hoping that someone has found an answer in his or her own life that can make sense of ours. The

But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." —2 Corinthians 3:16-18

How readily we push Jesus Christ off his judgment seat and take our place there to pronounce on others (though we've neither the knowledge nor the authority to judge anyone.) None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know, we can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another.

Blessed are not the enlightened whose every question has been answered and who are delighted with their own sublime insight, the mature and ripe ones whose one remaining action is to fall from the tree. Blessed, rather, are the chased, the harassed who must daily stand before my enigmas and cannot solve them.

Do we feel dry, weary, filled with a sense of failure? In the twinkle of an eye we can relate our mood to Jesus Who one day felt the same way and collapsed exhausted by a well in Samaria. I can invite this tired Jesus into my very discouragement: "Jesus, here I am, whipped, wiped out, in the pits, and all Yours." —The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

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.

The signature of Jesus, the Cross, is the ultimate expression of God's love for the world. The church is the church of the crucified, risen Christ only when it is stamped with his signature; only when it faces outward and moves with him along the way of the Cross. Turned inward upon itself in bickering and theological hairsplitting, the church loses its identity and its mission.

To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.

Over a hundred years ago in the Deep South, a phrase commonplace in our Christian culture today, born again, was seldom used. Rather, the words used to describe the breakthrough into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ were: "I was seized by the power of a great affection.

Cultic worship is not only hypocritical but absolutely meaningless if it is not accompanied by love for other people; for in such a way it cannot possibly be a way of giving thanks to God.

To be alive is to be broken. And to be broken is to stand in need of grace. Honesty keeps us in touch with our neediness and the truth that we are saved sinners. There is a beautiful transparency to honest disciples who never wear a false face and do not pretend to be anything but who they are.

We have so theologized the passion and death of this sacred man that we no longer see the slow unraveling of His tissue, the spread of gangrene, His raging thirst.

All that we have and are is one of the unique and never-to-be-repeated ways God has chosen to express himself in space and time.

In prayer Jesus slows us down, teaches us to count how few days we have, and gifts us with wisdom. He reveals to us that we are so caught up in what is urgent that we have overlooked what is essential. He ends our indecision and liberates us from the oppression of false deadlines and myopic vision.

The religion of cheerfulness, as Father Brown reminds us, is a cruel religion, and maybe the best way not to go mad is not to mind too much if you do go mad."2

Failure to recognize the value of mere being with God, as the beloved, without doing anything, is to gouge the heart out of Christianity."10

There is no limit to the defenses we contrive against the inbreak of truth into our lives.

The furious love of God knows no shadow of alteration or change. It is reliable. And always tender.

The awesome love of our invisible God has become both visible and audible in Jesus Christ

But trust in the God who loves consistently and faithfully nurtures confident, free disciples. A loving God fosters a loving people. "The fact that our view of God shapes our lives to a great extent may be one of the reasons Scripture ascribes such importance to seeking to know Him."2

It is through such failure and weeping that the Abba of Jesus conforms us to the image of His Son. Yet if our faith is not alive and dynamically operative, suffering is absurd, pointless.

the old Russian proverb, "Those who have the disease called Jesus will never be cured.

repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven. It serves as an expression of gratitude rather than an effort to earn forgiveness. Thus the sequence of forgiveness and then repentance, rather than repentance and then forgiveness, is crucial for understanding the gospel of grace.