Quotes from Brennan Manning

Through no merit of ours, but by His mercy, we have been restored to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of His beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of grace.

In days long ago when there were no spiritual directors or brilliant commentaries on Scripture, fidelity to God's will was the whole of spirituality.

If we continue to focus solely on the sinner/saint duality in our person and conduct, while ignoring the raging opposition between the Pharisee and the child, spiritual growth will come to an abrupt standstill.

not for heaven's sake but for our sakes, yours and mine. This vulgar grace is indiscriminate compassion. It works without asking anything of us. It's not cheap. It's free, and as such will always be a banana peel for the orthodox foot and a fairy tale for the grown-up sensibility. Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try to find something or someone it cannot cover. Grace is enough. He is enough. Jesus is enough.

No one, it seems to me, who has fully grasped the Crucifixion can ever again take seriously any expression or instrument of worldly power, however venerable, glittering, or seemingly formidable. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart, Naught is all else to me, save that thou art. Thou my best thought by day and by night, Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light. Be thou my wisdom, thou my true word; I ever with thee, thou with me, Lord.

The second journey begins when we know we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the morning program.

Christians are a people of hope to the extent that others can find in us a source of strength and joy. If not, our profession of faith 'by the power of the Holy Spirit He was born of the Virgin Mary and became man' is as academic, tentative, and hopeless as the alcoholic who promises, 'I'll quit tomorrow.

Dear Abba, I'm starting out free today, free from the advertised lies that promise me everything from four-doors of turbo-charged happiness to some contraption that will shake, rattle, and roll my abs back into a pack I never had even in my twenties. It would be comical if it wasn't so sad: all of our desires to make ourselves worthy of this world but unfit for the world to come. I want to be a follower of the sacred dream, and one day arrive fully free, free at last.

Keep practicing until it lives inside you; then it will seem foolishly easy to the unpracticed. — BILL HOLM, "FRIED CHICKEN IN ICELAND

Preoccupation with our past sins, present weaknesses, and character defects gets our emotions churning in self-destructive ways, closes us within the mighty citadel of self, and preempts the presence of a compassionate God.

His consistent banging on the drums of God's unconditional love sounded at a time when many of us had about "had it up to here" with religion and church and, probably most importantly, ourselves. We were the tired, poor, self-hating huddled masses yearning to be free, and along came a patchwork preacher who grinned and said, "You already are. Abba loves you. Let's go get some chocolate ice cream.

From that moment on, no Christian can ever say one form of prayer is as good as another or one religion is as good as another.

Young Christians are sick of pablum. It doesn't work anymore. They are tired of rabbinical hair-splitting, empty liturgical apparatus, Sunday school minutiae, the ghostly voices of the old regime; they reject stuck minds and methods and by their indifference to structures and traditional authorities

Quite simply, our deep gratitude to Jesus Christ is manifested neither in being chaste, honest, sober, and respectable, nor in churchgoing, Bible-toting, and Psalm-singing, but in our deep and delicate respect for one another.

When belonging to an elite group eclipses the love of God, when I draw life and meaning from any source other than my belovedness, I am spiritually dead.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty observes in The Gospel Without Compromise: The Gospel can be summed up by saying that it is the tremendous, tender, compassionate, gentle, extraordinary, explosive, revolutionary revelation of Christ's love.

The deeper we grow in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the poorer we become—the more we realize that everything in life is a gift.

His love is never, never, never based on our performance, never conditioned by our moods—of elation or depression. The furious love of God knows no shadow of alteration or change.

Silence is not simply the absence of noise or the shutdown of communication with the outside world, but rather a process of coming to stillness.

Coming to interior stillness requires waiting.

Why do we judge Jesus' criterion for authentic discipleship irrelevant? Jesus said the world is going to recognize you as His by only one sign: the way you are with one another on the street every day.

The mature Christians I have met along the way are those who have failed and have learned to live gracefully with their failure.

Paul Tillich never tired of saying, "Faith is the courage to accept acceptance, to accept that God loves me as I am and not as I should be, because I'm never going to be as I should be.