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.

Brennan Manning and Ice Cream

My favorite dessert in the entire world is vanilla ice cream. If I had to name a favorite brand (aside from homemade), it would be Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla.

But there was one day the vanilla ice cream tasted bad.

From the time I was six or seven to the time I was 13, I spent a week each summer with my grandmother in Shreveport. She lived on the western side of town, in what would then have been called a middle- to working-class neighborhood “out the Greenwood Road.” Church was an important part of her life; she would play piano and sing both with the choir and solo. She even sang a solo on her 90^th birthday.

I loved being with my grandmother, but the neighborhood was largely devoid of other kids. One boy my age, named David, lived next door to my grandmother, and his family was as active in the church as my grandmother was. David and I always paired off whenever I came to town.

The church pastor lived a block away. He and his wife had taken in two foster children, brothers just a year or two younger than I was. For some reason, they always looked like they had been rolling around in mud. But they were friendly kids in a neighborhood where three boys were the entire universe of children.

It was always hot in the summer in Shreveport, and many homes didn’t have air conditioning. My grandmother had a window unit that she used for her bedroom and the one I slept in next to hers. Next door, David’s family hadn’t gotten air conditioners yet, but they did have large electric fans.

The four of us boys had been playing; it was early afternoon and blazing hot. We all likely smelled rather poorly. David had a brilliant idea – to get some ice cream from his freezer. He went inside to his kitchen and we waited outside.

A few minutes later, he called for me to come inside. I went into the kitchen, and saw two bowls of ice cream on the table. And I turned and saw two faces peering through the kitchen’s screen door. I asked David where the other boys’ ice cream was. “They don’t get any,” he said. “They’re foster children.”

We sat at the kitchen table. David began to eat, and I stared first at my bowl and then at the screen door. “Can we give them some?” I asked.

Clearly aggravated, David stomped to the freezer atop the refrigerator, got the ice cream, and scooped out small portions in two bowls. He brought it to the two boys at the door with a rather superior “Here’s yours.” He came back to the table and rather glared at me. “They’re dirty and no-account,” he said. The boys heard him but in the joy of eating the ice cream, even outside in the heat, they didn’t seem to care.

It was the one time in my life I can remember thinking the ice cream tasted bad.

This came to mind while I was reading Brennan Manning’s The Furious Longing of God. “In human beings,” he writes, “love is a quality, a high-prized virtue; in God, love is His identity.” We humans desperately want to be loved; we have a more difficult time with being love.

I wasn’t a hero the day the ice cream tasted bad. I was motivated by guilt; how could I enjoy something when it was being denied to those two brothers right in front of me?

The two boys were likely used to this kind of treatment; they didn’t seem surprised by it, nor did they protest. They were going to sit there outside the kitchen door and watch us eat our ice cream, like we deserved it and they didn’t.

The joy on their faces because of two small portions of ice cream was itself something miraculous to behold.

And the ice cream suddenly tasted remarkably better.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Furious Longing of God. To see other posts on this chapter, “Unplanned moment of prayer,” please visit Sarah at LivingBetween the Lines.

Brennan Manning: Do the Next Thing in Love

I’m reading Brennan Manning’s The Furious Longing of God, and several chapters in I’ve had a blinding flash of the obvious.

Manning is writing about what he calls God’s furious longing, but he is also writing about a furious longing of his own – a furious longing for god and a furious longing to demonstrate or live God.

His words in the chapter entitled “Union” suggest an urgency of both action and intent. At times his words seem almost breathless, as if he’s trying to say everything as quickly as possible because time is short.

And that is, perhaps, the point – the time is short. In our day-to-day existence time seems to stretch forever in front of us, until we get older and discover it’s moving faster. But as the idea of union with God takes hold in our hearts, minds, and souls, we discover that time is simultaneously eternal and short.

It’s with a sense of urgency that Manning writes one of the most striking sentences in the chapter, if not the book: Do the next thing in love.

A simple statement, it almost sounds like something Oprah or Dr. Phil might say. But Manning is speaking from a very different perspective. It might also be said this way: Do the next thing with God’s love, in God’s love, by God’s love, because you are the manifestation of God’s love.

“Love by its nature seeks union,” he writes. “With the grace of recognition comes the awesome and alarming awareness that Jesus, the incarnation of the furious longing of God, wants more than a close relationship with you and me; He seeks nothing less than union.”

That blessing flows outward; we can’t contain it. Wrapped in that blessing, we can’t help but do the next thing in love.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Furious Longing of god. To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Brennan Manning’s “Our Father”

I was a child in the 1950s, that era of Eisenhower and Elvis Presley and new technologies like home televisions and air conditioning. My parents were the Great Depression/World War II generation, and they were shaped by both those experiences. One of the things that life in a middle class home in a middle class suburb meant was that you never argued in front of the kids.

The one time I can remember my parents arguing had to do with me. I was eight. My father was to take me for a Saturday outing to the French Quarter, just the two of us.

A few years before, he had started his own printing business, and he worked every day, often for 12 hours or more. It was not unusual for me not to see him for weeks at a time. He would often be gone by the time I woke up in the morning and not return until after I was in bed at night.

The night before our French Quarter visit, he told me mother and me that he had to work that Saturday and he couldn’t take me as planned.

I don’t remember how I responded. Disappointment, likely. I don’t think I threw a tantrum, because I wasn’t a tantrum type of kid.

My mother got angry. She blew up. He blew up. They sent me to my room to get me out of the way (but not out of earshot). Later, my mother told me that the trip to the French Quarter was on, and my father and I would be going.

I remember the day as gray and overcast, leaning to the cool side. I know it was February 1960 because a Jackson Square artist did a pastel drawing of me, and signed and dated it. I still have the drawing, pastel on black paper. It’s a side view of my head and shoulders; he drew me wearing a white t-shirt. We ate coffee and doughnuts at Café DuMonde; and we visited the Cabildo and St. Louis Cathedral. I don’t recall much else, but it was enough. It’s the one time I can remember as a child spending an extended period of time with my father.

That argument, and that event, came to mind as I read the chapter entitled “Our Father” in Brennan Manning’s The Furious Longing of God. “Only Jesus revealed to an astonished Jewish community that God is truly Father,” Manning writes. “If you took the love of all the best mothers and fathers who have lived in the course of human history, all their goodness, kindness, patience, fidelity, wisdom, tenderness, strength, and love and united all those qualities in a single person, that person’s love would only be a faint shadow of the furious love and mercy in the heart of God the Father addressed to you and me at this moment.”

Many say that it is our fathers who shape our understanding of God. For me, for a long time, God was someone who was there but not actually involved in my life. And I didn’t live my life like he was actually and intimately involved.

It was a shock to learn that God not only loved me but that He was actively involved in loving me, that He considered me his much-loved child and that He was all over me.

It was frightening when I understood that. It still is occasionally. But over time the fear diminished and the confidence grew. No matter what happened or what I did, He was going to be there.

My father loved me. Like so many of his generation, he had a hard time showing that to his children. And while it hurt for a time not to be sure, it prepared me for love of God that was waiting for me.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading The Furious Longing of God. To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Brennan Manning’s Fury

As you get older, your understanding of God changes.

It doesn’t mean it gets better or more insightful, but it changes. Brennan Manning knows, and he describes this change in The Furious Longing of God.

“So much of what was presented to me as real in bygone days, I now see as fictitious,” he writes. “The splenetic god of alternating moods, the prejudiced god partial to Catholics, the irritated god disgusted with believers, the warrior god of the ‘just’ war, the fickle god of casuistic morality, tut-tutting our little weaknesses, the pedantic god of the spiritually sophisticated, the myriad of gods who imprisoned me in the house of fear: I could go on.”

The closer he gets to death, he says, the less inclined he is “to limit the wisdom and infinity of God.”

When we’re 28 we know everything; when we’re 61 we’re astonished at how little we actually know, and how much less we understand.

Perhaps it’s the battering of life, or the decline of the appropriate part of the brain that deals with certainty.

What I do know is this: as I get older, I’m thinking more with my heart than my head. I understand that it doesn’t really matter who’s in the White House, or what the composition of the supreme Court is, or what the American Civil Liberties Union is up to. Not long term, anyway. Not in the grand scheme of things.

We are but a breath, a whisper in time.

What I am growing  more certain of is that God cares about the whispers. And more than that, he cares mightily for them. Manning talks about that might care in terms of longing, on fury, a desire for union that is overwhelming.

We don’t resist that desire. We can’t.

When it focuses on us, we’re done for. We can’t escape it. When it comes we have no choice but to give ourselves up.

This is terrifying. This is exhilarating.

This is humbling.

That fury comes upon us, and we are changed forever.

And we will never fully understand it. But we accept it.

When we are young, we question.

When we are old, that acceptance is enough. It is sufficient.

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

The 40th Anniversary of a Furious Longing

I’ve started reading Brennan Manning’s The Furious Longing of God. The Wednesday book discussion led by Sarah Salter and Jason Stayszsen is up and running, and we’re reading the Manning book.

And all it takes to pitch me backward in time is the first sentence in Manning’s introduction: “For two years, between 1971 and 1973, I lived with a community of Franciscans in Bayou La Batre, Alabama.”

While Manning was with the Franciscans, I was finishing my last two years of college at LSU, and crashing toward my own confrontation with the Creator.

Forty years ago, on Jan. 25, 1973, I discovered the furious longing of God.

I should be more precise: Forty years ago, I recognized the furious longing of God. It had been there all along. I had had occasional glimpses of it before then – taking my catechism classes in 7^th and 8^th grade more seriously than anyone of my fellow catechumens; breaking away from my Lutheran roots and attending a Baptist church late in high school; considering the possibility of Lutheran seminary when I discovered I was not designed for a pre-med curriculum.

The dance had started, but I didn’t understand that the different steps were actually a dance.

To those who knew me, especially at college, I did not seem a candidate for God’s furious longing. I was not attending church. I didn’t hang out with the Christian crowd in the fraternity. I was majoring in journalism – proof of my basic paganism. I was known for enjoying fraternity football-game parties, jungle juice parties, just about anything that had the word “party” in it. I filled my non-party hours with work – school work and my work at the student newspaper.

I filled up as much of my life as I physically could in the vain attempt to block out the reality of emptiness – mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

I’ve previously told the story of what happened. But that night, I came face-to-face with what I had been running from – my own sorry self, and what Manning calls “the furious longing of God.”

This is how Manning describes it: “the furious longing of God is beyond our wildest desires, our hope or hopelessness, our rectitude or wickedness, neither cornered by sweet talk or gentle persuasion…It cannot be tamed, boxed, captivated, housebroken, or templebroken. It is simply and startlingly Jesus, the effulgence of the Father’s love.”

That was it. Almost exactly. I was overwhelmed to the point of prayer.

And then came the next 40 years of honing, polishing, shaping, breaking, reconstructing. One day, I expect to see all this finished. But not anytime soon.

To see more of the discussion on this first chapter of The Furious Longing of God, netitled “Genesis,” please visit Sarah Salter at Living Between the Lines.