“Patched Together” by Brennan Manning

Willie Juan is a young boy with a crippled leg, the result of an automobile accident. He also bears of the scars from burned skin he received in the same accident. He’s been raised by his grandmother, Calm Sunset, in a village called Hopi, which could be Mexico or New Mexico. More often than not, he finds himself the object of the other children’s jokes and cruelty. The scars on the inside may be worse than the scares on the outside.

One day at a town festival, Willie Juan meets Medicine Man, who’s selling a healing liquid. The townspeople laugh in ridicule and walk away, but Willie Juan remains, and as a result his life will change forever. After he returns to his grandmother, he discovers that the liquid has an effect but it doesn’t heal his scars, and he turns away from all the Medicine Man told him. Eventually, his grandmother tells him he must climb the nearby hills to the Cave of Bright Darkness, and wait for what will happen. And what happens is a visit by the cave’s spirit and eventually the Medicine Man himself.

Patched Together: A Story of My Story by Brennan Manning (1934-2013) is an allegory of salvation and redemption. It is a three-part story, assembled from separate writings by Manning published in 1997 and 2002; this assembled version was published in 2010. Manning – the revered priest, speaker, and author – is perhaps best known for The Ragamuffin Gospel and his friendship with singer Rich Mullins. But Manning was also a prolific author of numerous books on faith, grace, and Christianity.

Brennan Manning

Patched Together is framed as three times of day, morning, noon, and night, representing the three periods of Willie Juan’s life – childhood, adulthood, and old age. In all three, Willie Juan will find himself wandering from what he’s learned from the Medicine Man. He becomes widely known for his carvings of wood, and then for playing the trumpet. World success, however, doesn’t equate spiritual success.

In an author’s note, Manning called Patched Together his story. It’s more than that, of course. It’s all of our stories. Willie Juan is Everyman, who receives the gospel but finds himself living a life of faith, doubt, self-reliance, and then return to faith – many times in a single life.

But after night, as Manning points out, there always comes the morning.

Related:

Brennan Manning’s All is Grace.

James Bryan Smith’s Rich Mullins.

Top photograph by Matt Le via Unsplash. Used with permission.

James Bryan Smith’s “Rich Mullins”

If one had to name the most influential musician in Christian contemporary music of the last 40 years, the answer might be Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, Stephen Curtis Chapman, and several other well-known names. But the musician who influenced them, and had an impact that is still reverberating 18 years after his death, is Rich Mullins.

Song after song, hit after hit, Mullins was as known for his music as he was for his rather iconoclastic reaction to fame. He shrugged it off. He saw himself as a broken vessel, redeemed by his Creator, and his music reflected that belief.

And millions of people identified with that music. “My God is an Awesome God,” “Step by Step,” “Creed,” “Elijah”  – songs written and recorded by Mullins and recorded by scores of other musicians. Some have already made their way into contemporary hymn books.

Mullins was also known for his friendship with Brennan Manning (1937-2013), and was counseled by Manning the last few years of his life. Mullins adopted Brenann’s “Ragamuffin gospel” for the name of his band, and how he described himself – a ragamuffin.

Mullins’ influence extended into my own family. I can remember how the news of his death in an automobile accident in 1997 affected both my wife and my oldest son, who was then in high school. For them and millions of others, Mullins’ death was more than the death of a favored musician or even a friend; it was like losing someone whose music touched their hearts and souls.

In 2000, James Bryant Smith wrote a biography of Mullins, Rich Mullins: A Devotional Biography: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven, and he did it in an unusual way. Rather than the more common chronological account, Smith wrote the biography as a devotional. Perhaps for that reason, the work has remained current.

With an introduction by Brennan Manning, the biography is structured around 10 devotional themes: family, creed, the love of God, trusting in Jesus, creation, struggle and pain, simplicity, sin and temptation, loving one another, and death and the life to come. The discussion for each theme combines, biographical information, interviews with people who knew Mullins, some of Mullins’ own writings, quotations, and the words of Mullins’ songs. With such disparate elements, the biography could have come across disjointed and cobbled together, but it doesn’t; it stays centered on Mullins and his faith.

James Bryant Smith

This was a widely popular Christian musician whose typical concert clothes were a t-shirt, jeans, and bare feet. Early on, he fronted at concerts for big name Christian bands; by the end of his life, the singer and songwriter who typically performed in church settings had eclipsed them all.

The most telling line in the book, among many telling lines, is this, and it speaks volumes about Mullins and his work: “Rich Mullins was not encumbered by the need to succeed; he was captive to the need to create.”

Smith received his M.Div. degree from Yale University Divinity School and his D. Min. degree from Fuller Seminary. He is a professor of theology at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, and leads the Christian Spiritual Formation Institute there.

He is the author of several books, including Room of Marvels (2004); The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows (2009); The Good and Beautiful Life: Putting on the Character of Christ (2010); The Good and Beautiful Community: Following the Spirit, Extending Grace, Demonstrating Love (2010); A Spiritual Formation Workbook: Small Group Resources for Nurturing Christian Growth (2010); Embracing the Love of God: The Path and Promise of Christian Life (2010); The Kingdom and the Cross (2010); and Hidden in Christ: Living as God's Beloved (2013).

Rich Mullins: A Devotional Biography is a profound way to do two things simultaneously: learn about the life and music of a man who became a legend, and examine one’s own life in the process.

Brandon Heath and Third Day sing "Creed" by Rich Mullins

Rich Mullins in concert, singing "Step by Step"

Brennan Manning: Unimaginable Love

I’ve talked before about a short-term mission trip I participated in that unexpectedly led our small team to Erfurt, Germany. Erfurt, where Martin Luther attended seminary, had been part of East Germany from 1945 to 1989. The church we visited there had previously been a Communist Party social hall.

Thirteen people had been killed by a gunman at a local high school. Without anyone really understanding why, our team was diverted from its packed schedule to meet with the young pastor at the church.

What happened while we interviewed him, sitting in a pew in the church sanctuary, still mystifies me. But the three of us – the pastor, me the interviewer, and the cameraman – experienced something overwhelming.

With the school tragedy just a few blocks away, we had been interviewing the pastor about his ministering to the parents, teachers and children when something surrounded us, silenced us, and led the three of us to individually and simultaneously begin to weep.

Emotion was being expressed, but it wasn’t emotion that surrounded us. It was a presence. It wasn’t warm and loving; at first it was terrifying. And then humbling. And then calming and secure, producing in us an exhausted resolve.

Silence followed. The logical question was, “What was that?” But we knew, and the knowledge itself was a thing of wonder.

Brennan Manning, in The Furious Longing of God, actually describes what happened to us in that small church in Erfurt.

“Contemplation of the furious longing of God is elevated to a dramatic level in those rare and unforgettable moments when our faith, hope, and love are raised to an unprecedented level by the Holy Spirit’s active intervention, much like being in (a) boat when a storm hits. We are plunged into mystery… Self-consciousness and self-awareness disappear. We are in the presence of the ineffable Mystery above all creatures and beyond all telling.

“These are moments of truth. You are alone with The Alone. God’s tender feelings for you are no longer dry knowledge.”

That describes what happened. I’ve never had the desire to repeat the experience.

Once was more than sufficient.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Furious Longing of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Unimaginable Love,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Mardi Gras Beads and Brennan Manning

When I was a child, my father owned a printing business in downtown New Orleans. His office was two longish blocks from St. Charles Avenue, which among other things was the main drag for all the parades on Mardi Gras Day. For the family, and a lot of friends and relatives, the office location was a perfect spot for enjoying the day. Watch a parade, walk back to the office, have access to bathroom facilities and food, go back to the parades – it was close to ideal.

I was something of a Mardi Gras “rat” – I loved the parades, I loved the crazy people dressed up in crazy costumes (or lack thereof), and I loved all the beads, trinkets and doubloons thrown from the floats. And I could scramble with the best of them. I’d usually arrive home with a big bag, or bags, of loot.

One year, our next-door neighbors (Yankees from Illinois) had friends visiting (also Yankees from Illinois). And the two children of the Yankees from Illinois did not how to scramble for Mardi Gras loot. The kids were devastated – they’d seen all the largesse flung from the floats, and had come away with two pairs of beads, courtesy of a lucky catch by their father.

I had had an unusually good haul. In other words, I was loaded – beads, doubloons, plastic toys, trinkets of every size and variety. It had been a good haul, one of my best, in fact.

At breakfast the morning after Mardi Gras, my mother mentioned the distraught visitors from next door. And then gave me a questioning look.

That afternoon, after school, I brought a bag of loot next door. (And by “loot” I mean what was usually thrown from floats – the bag might have had a monetary value of 39 cents.) I explained that we had heard about what had happened, and we had plenty to spare. (Yes, I was in 9-year-old agony at the thought of giving any of my loot up, but, well, it was making my mother happy.)

You would have thought by the visitors’ reactions that I had just brought in a haul from Tiffany’s. Let’s just say they were effusive in their thanks, so much so that I ended up embarrassed.

I learned something that day. Grace could take the form of cheap Mardi Gras trinkets. I had given up some of my priceless “treasure” and had experienced a blessing – how looks and feelings of disappointment could change into excitement and joy.

The Yankees had done nothing to deserve it, had not asked for it, and didn’t even know up about, until I showed up at the front door.

It was a bit like faith, and salvation. We do nothing to deserve it, and yet it comes, often unexpectedly.

“Our religion never begins with what we do for God,” Brennan Manning writes in The Furious Longing of God. “It always starts with what God has done for us, the great and wondrous things that God dreamed of and achieved for us in Christ Jesus.”

No, a bag of Mardi Gras beads isn’t the same thing. And it probably wasn’t even the beads that were the real cause of the excitement, at least for me. I learned what a gift could represent.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Furious Longing of God. To see more posts on this chapter, entitled “Giving,” please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact.

Brennan Manning: Fire

I was a contra when it wasn’t cool.

From a cultural perspective, my transition from high school to college was jarring, dislocating – and often bewildering. It wasn’t because academics were harder; I actually found college to be overall easier than high school (except for chemistry!) in the academic department.

No, the disconnect was cultural. I had been born and raised in New Orleans, which was (and is still) a lot different than the rest of Louisiana. Despite the rather more, ah, freewheeling culture of my hometown, I found myself pitched headfirst into the college culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yes, even in Louisiana.

And, weird clothes and hairstyles aside, the single greatest difference between high school and college was drugs.

Of the 24 of us freshmen in the wing of our dormitory, five of us were not into drugs: marijuana, speed, sometimes harder stuff. By accident, one of us five discovered that drugs were stashed throughout the wing – mostly closets in the rooms but sometimes other places. The uncool five got together one night and said, what do we do about this? If some legal authority suddenly did a raid, we would be scooped up with everyone else.

So we called a meeting of our wing, without the two counselors. We asked the other 19 to remove drugs from the premises. We didn’t lecture them on the evil of drugs; we didn’t make any veiled threats; we just asked them to remove it.

I have to say that I didn’t act out of my Christian faith and beliefs. Faith was three years in the future. I did it out of self-preservation and (to a lesser extent) concern for two of three of the people caught up in using drugs. They were spiraling downward and fast.

The real surprise was, the people using drugs agreed with us. And before the night was out, all the stuff was gone from the dorm. Drug use didn’t stop, of course, but not having drugs readily at hand did tend to decrease consumption.

It was my first real lesson in being a “contra” – standing against the prevailing and sometimes overwhelming culture. Three years later, when I did find faith, I discovered another “contra” – Jesus. Jesus was not about conformity. He was not about going with the prevailing wind. He was not about telling people what they wanted to hear. Nor was he about trying to be cool and hip.

He was something else. Something original. And he spoke a language I had not heard before.

“When preached purely,” Brennan Manning writes in The Furious Longing of God, “His Word exalts, frightens, shocks, and forces us to reassess our whole life. The gospel breaks our train of thought, shatters our comfortable piety, and cracks open our capsule truths. The flashing spirit of Jesus Christ breaks new paths everywhere.”

I’ve been caught up in “contra” situations numerous times in my life – school, work, church, the community. What I’ve learned is – right doesn’t always prevail. Not everyone says, “No, keeping illegal drugs here is wrong.” Sometimes The Big Lie wins. People say terrible things about you and what you hold dear. People do terrible things to you and what you hold dear.

But even when you feel like fresh road kill, you know something unbelievably shocking, something that is an integral part of the gospel message.

Those who do the wrong thing, who may hate you for what you say and do, also know God’s Word is right. They can’t help but know it, because each and every one of them is made in God’s image. Sometimes that makes it worse. But they know it.

The gospel message can be – often is – a fire in the soul, and a fire in the heart. And that’s what it was meant to be.

Led by Jason Stasyzsen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Furious Longing of God. Today’s discussion is on the chapter entitled “Fire.” To see more posts, please visit Sarah at Living Between theLines.

Brennan Manning: Boldness

When you read the Book of Acts in the Bible, and especially chapters 13 on (Paul’s missionary journeys), you find a distinct narrative pattern, with a new relatively minor variations.

Paul and his companions enter a city, go to a synagogue, and are invited to speak, a common practice for visiting Jews, They preach the gospel, explaining how Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah. A number of people believe, everybody talks about their message, and the Jews in the synagogue get upset, disinviting Paul and his people. Paul preaches and teaches elsewhere; the Jews (or the silversmiths in Ephesus) raise a ruckus, and eventually Paul and his companions are driven out, and sometimes stoned and beaten.

The narrative is largely repeated everywhere Paul goes. There are at least two interesting observations from this repetition.

First, it’s clear that the gospel message drives people to extremes – they embrace it, or they want to kill the messenger (and sometimes try).

Second, Paul himself knows what will happen. He becomes as familiar with the pattern while living it as we are by reading it. Preach. Some believe. Others get upset. Bad things follow. On to the next town.

This would have to become discouraging after the first few times. And yet, something else happens each time, no matter how bad the previous experience was.

Paul speaks with boldness.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the synagogue rulers at Pisidian Antioch, or the philosophers in Athens, or Roman officials in Corinth, Ephesus and Jerusalem.

Paul speaks with boldness. Always.

We know Paul suffered. He recounts how many times he was beaten, imprisoned, stoned, lashed, assaulted and otherwise persecuted. We know he suffered with a “thorn,” even if the New Testament is not explicit as to what it actually was. And he was human – we know he must have experienced discouragement, despair, doubt, and possibly even depression.

But when it mattered, he spoke boldly. He could argue and debate with the best of them. He was educated, born a Roman citizen when it still counted for something, and had studied under Gamaliel in Jerusalem.

Boldness, Brennan Manning suggests in The Furious Longing of God, is one of the characteristics of a disciple. Be bold, he says. Boldly ask. You don’t need a cohort of sympathizers or any other kind of security blanket.

So speak with boldness. And act with boldness.

Be bold.

You’re a disciple.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’re discussing The Furious Longing of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Boldness,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Brennan Manning: Healing

One of my favorite books, if not my most favorite book, is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. I first read it in high school – the entire unabridged edition that was one big fat paperback.

I loved the story. I loved the crazy elderly Spanish landowner galloping around the countryside, tilting at windmills, and recognizing only the nobility in common, everyday things. It was so wildly improbable – the prostitute Aldonza could really be the beautiful Dulcinea? And a barber’s bowl was the golden helmet of Mambrino?

I loved the 1972 movie with Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren, too. I saw it while I was in college.

Some 20 years later, I read it again, during a week we spent in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Each morning, I’d carry the book down to the hotel beach, get my umbrella and chair from the attendant, and settle in to ride with Don Quixote across the landscape of early 1600s Spain.

It has lost none of its magic, but this time I could see the story was ultimately about redemption, and how people were reborn as the people they were meant to be when this crazy old gentleman on a broken down horse touched their lives.

It’s worth noting that Don Quixote was written during the Spanish inquisition, when many innocent people were arrested, tortured and killed.

In The Furious Longing of God, Brennan Manning recounts the story of Don Quixote and Aldonza. He draws a parallel between her redemption with the redemption of us by God, through the “healing of affirmation” by the crazy old man. Aldonza the prostitute indeed becomes the beautiful Dulcinea, her ugliness and sin washed away. Don Quixote saw her as the woman she was meant to be, and she believed.

A story can be powerful, even a much simpler (and less literary) story than Don Quixote. I was told that a woman who had been witnessed to for years by her husband, brother-in-law, and mother-in-law, had read my novel Dancing Priest and said to her husband, “I finally understand what you mean when you talk about faith.”

I’ve been touched by a healing hand of affirmation more times than I can remember – a pastor and his wife, cash sent anonymously through the mail to meet a need, a pastor who sat with us and prayed while my oldest son had brain surgery, by my pastor and a few elders who prayed over me and ruptured disc. Over and over again people have reached out and touched me with a hand of healing.

“According to that mysterious substitution of Christ for the Christian,” Manning writes, “what we do to one another we do to Jesus.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Furious Longing of God. To read more posts on this chapter, “Healing,” please visit Sarah at LivingBetween the Lines.

Brennan Manning: Little Gifts - Healing

I was asked to “give my testimony” for church’s recent deacon board meeting, but it wasn’t the expected “here’s how I was saved” testimony. No, the deacon board chairman had heard a story I told, and he wanted me to tell the entire board.

The day before Father’s Day, 2011, I was digging a small hole in our home garden for a new plant. I finished digging, placed the plant and the emended soil in the hole, and stood up. A pain so sharp shot through my body that I had to brace myself against the house. For several moments, I couldn’t walk, and when I did, I had to take baby steps.

“I pulled something,” I thought. I got inside, took ibuprofen, and it was much improved the next day.

Three weeks later, it was back big time. No position was comfortable. The best sleeping position was flat on my back on the floor, and no pillow. The doctor prescribed medication that was one short stop from morphine, and I was taking it full strength. I couldn’t drive for three weeks, and so I worked from as best I would.

I started using a cane. At one point, I was walking sideways.

The MRI confirmed the doctor’s diagnosis – I had a ruptured disk (No. 5, for those who know this stuff). Surgery became a distinct possibility.

I had cortisone shots in the back. Twice. Neither had any effect. I went to one physical therapy facility, and each time had a different therapist. After a few weeks, a new therapist looked at my file and said, “We have you doing too many things. Every therapist has a favorite set of exercises, and none of it’s doing any good.”

I found another therapist. Every Tuesday and Thursday for the next six months, I was in physical therapy. And traction twice a week.

In November, our pastor preached a sermon on anointing and healing. My wife kept nudging me. I rolled my eyes. We knew what the problem was, and a drop of oil on my forehead wasn’t going to fix it.

But I studied the specific passage in the epistle of James. This is what it says: “Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective” (James 5:14-16).

If you look at the verse in context, it is one in a rather long list of instructions at the end of the letter. Cumulatively, the instructions are about submission. And if you read it closely, you’ll see the passage doesn’t promise a miraculous, instant healing. It just says healing will happen – and suggests that the healing is much broader than a temporary sickness.

Submission, huh? Great. The one thing I’ve always wrestled with.

I asked our pastor to schedule a praying and anointing ceremony. It happened in December, after a Sunday church service. I didn’t expect instant healing. I knew this was about submission. And I was not instantly healed.

I could tell that physical therapy was helping, but I was a long way off from healed.

A few weeks late, in January, we met with a surgeon. He looked at the x-rays and shocked us when he said, “No surgery. You’re healing.”

“But the pain is still there,” I said, dumbfounded. “How can I be healing?”

“Your brain hasn’t figured it out yet. It’s learned that pain is there, so that’s what you’re feeling. But the rupture is dissolving. No surgery.”

A month later, I put the cane in the closet.

About six weeks after that, I rode my bike for the first time in nine months.

Brennan Manning, in The Furious Longing of God, quotes the words of Hans Urs Von Balthasar: “I say to you, blessed is he who exposes himself to an existence never brought under mastery, who does not transcend, but rather abandons himself to my ever-transcending grace.”

It wasn’t about back pain. It was about submission. And faith. A ruptured disk turned out to be a little gift.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Furious Longing of God. To see other posts on this chapter, “Little Gifts: Healing,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

The photograph at the top could easily have been me, except you would have seen the physical therapist pushing with all her strength to force my leg upright. It brought tears every time she did it.