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On April Fool’s Day, 1975, a drunk awoke in a doorway on Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
His shirt was splattered with his own vomit. A street person had stolen his shoes during the night.
As best he could remember, he had been drunk every day for the previous 18 months. Most nights he had slept on the beach or under a bridge, cradling a bottle of tequila, and was routinely chased off by local cops.
In his boozy fog, he looked down the street and noticed an attractive woman, probably in her twenties, accompanied by her young son.
The boy, who was about four years old, ran ahead. He wanted to get a good look at the drunk. She rushed up behind him and covered his eyes with her hands.
Then she endeavored to impart a life lesson to her son. “Don’t look at that filth!” she shouted. “That’s nothing but pure filth.” She reinforced her words with a swift kick to the drunk’s ribs.
Anyone who witnessed that scene would have been surprised to learn that the fellow on the ground was a Franciscan priest who had tried desperately, for 21 years, to be Mother Teresa.
He had voluntarily lived in squalor, including months on a mountainous garbage dump in Juarez, Mexico. He had masqueraded as a felon so he could live amongst the prisoners in a Swiss penitentiary, ministering to them as an equal. He had lived on the streets of New York City amongst young teenage prostitutes, both boys and girls, through the outreach efforts of Covenant House. He had secluded himself for six months in a remote cave in the Zaragoza desert of Spain.
He pushed himself hard. Then harder still, always in the hope that if he finally served and sacrificed enough, he could dare to believe that God actually loved him.
Then it all came crashing down.
After succumbing to alcohol and repeated violations of his monastic vows, Brennan Manning began to grasp that God’s love was not a prize to be won. It cannot be earned or achieved or deserved. It can only be received with empty hands.
What followed were 20 books, including several bestsellers, in which his recurring focus was God’s “reckless, raging” grace – poured out not just on people who feel bad because they have missed several morning devotional times, but on Grade A sinners who seem, in their own eyes and the eyes of the world, to be “pure filth.”
In his book The Furious Longing of God, Manning writes, “My critics, and there have been many, protest that I write too much about the love of God, and not enough about sin and hell and judgment and how to keep Christ in Christmas. They claim that I am unbalanced, unsound, and a little bit crazy.”
To that description he gladly pled guilty, noting that Jesus declared that he (like a good doctor) had come not for so-called healthy people, but for those who know themselves to be desperately sick (Mark 2:17).
Brennan, more than most people could ever fathom, understood what it meant to be loved in both his grace and disgrace.
He never quite got over that reality.
“I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a teacup,” he wrote, “than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God… Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don’t have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.”
If you happen to be struggling on Day Six of your New Year’s resolution to become more of the person you know you should be, perhaps would it be wise to ponder Manning’s question:
“Do you believe that the God of Jesus loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity—that he loves you in the morning sun and in the evening rain—that he loves you when your intellect denies it, your emotions refuse it, your whole being rejects it? Do you believe that God loves without condition or reservation and loves you this moment as you are and not as you should be?”
In this world, by means of your own efforts, you will never succeed at becoming the person you should be.
But thanks be to God:
He loves you not as you should be, but as you actually are.