Brennan Manning: Quotes from a True Warrior for Christ

"My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it."
— (The Ragamuffin Gospel)

"To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means."

"How glorious the splendor of a human heart that trusts that it is loved!"

"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."

"When a man or woman is truly honest, it is virtually impossible to insult them personally."

"When our inner child is not nurtured and nourished, our minds gradually close to new ideas, unprofitable commitments and the surprises of the Spirit."

"The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise."
— (Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God)

"Hope knows that if great trials are avoided great deeds remain undone and the possibility of growth into greatness of soul is aborted."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"There is the "you" that people see and then there is the "rest of you". Take some time and craft a picture of the "rest of you." This could be a drawing, in words, even a song. Just remember that the chances are good it will be full of paradox and contradictions. "
— (The Furious Longing of God)

"In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

When a person is evoked for who she is, not who she is not, the most often result will be the inner healing of her heart through the touch of affirmation.

Jesus said you are to love one another as I have loved you, a love that will possibly lead to the bloody, anguish gift of yourself, a love that forgives seven times seven, that keeps no record of wrong. This is the criterion, sole norm, the standard of discipleship in the New Israel of God."
— (The Furious Longing of God)

"Only reckless confidence in a Source greater than ourselves can empower us to forgive the wounds inflicted by others."
— Brennan Manning (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"But when we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible but not relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft and true witnesses without being manipulative."

"Everybody has a vocation to some form of life-work. However, behind that call (and deeper than any call), everybody has a vocation to be a person to be fully and deeply human in Christ Jesus."
— (The Wisdom of Tenderness: What Happens When God's Fierce Mercy Transforms Our Lives)

"Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"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. For this good and valid reason, we're told not to judge.

Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become."
— (The Wisdom of Tenderness: What Happens When God's Fierce Mercy Transforms Our Lives)

"Accepting the reality of our sinfulness means accepting our authentic self. Judas could not face his shadow; Peter could. The latter befriended the impostor within; the former raged against him."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"To ignore, repress, or dismiss our feelings is to fail to listen to the stirrings of the Spirit within our emotional life. Jesus listened. In John's Gospel we are told that Jesus was moved with the deepest emotions (11:33)... The gospel portrait of the beloved Child of Abba is that of a man exquisitely attuned to His emotions and uninhibited in expressing them. The Son of Man did not scorn of reject feelings as fickle and unreliable. They were sensitive antennae to which He listened carefully and through which He perceived the will of His Father for congruent speech and action."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"For me the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say yes to the present risenness of Jesus Christ."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more - this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, high emotion or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a fierce longing for God, an unyielding resolve to live in and out of our belovedness. - pg. 152
" - (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians: who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable."

"The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi."
— (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)

"I knew there was only one place to go. I sank down into the center of my soul, grew still, and listened to the Rabbi's heartbeat."

"The North American Church is at a critical juncture. The gospel of grace is being confused and compromised by silence, seduction, and outright subversion. The vitality of the faith is being jeopardized. The lying slogans of the fixers who carry religion like a sword of judgment pile up with impunity. Let ragamuffins everywhere gather as a confessing Church to cry out in protest. Revoke the licenses of religious leaders who falsify the idea of God. Sentence them to three years in solitude with the Bible as their only companion."
— (The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out)