A Man After God’s Own Heart — Brennan Manning’s Passing
A week ago I searched online to see if Brennan Manning had written a new book. I discovered he had died last month (April 12, 2013). I immediately felt the loss and discovered I had really loved him. His words had so often come to me from God’s own heart. I sat under the spell of his teaching an entire day and had felt I’d been sitting on the mount in Israel listening to Jesus teach, and often his eyes had found me in the crowd. I had felt nothing short of awe in the deepest part of my being that day – Brennan was full of the Holy Spirit and his words found their mark dead center.
I took a good while to think about Brennan, how much he’d done for his Lord, and for people like me … I felt sad for the world but, also, I felt joy for him and for God. What a beautiful moment in heaven it must have been when Abba gathered him close and Jesus kissed him, full of smiles. Brennan Manning knew Jesus and Jesus knew him.
Brennan would be the first to tell you he wasn’t perfect. What he boasted to know, though, was God’s favor and grace and he always spoke about the rich and abundant, Divine love that was so full of freedom and wildness. He talked about the furious longing of God … oh, yes, he knew what it was like to really know God. He could write and talk about it in ways that inspired many, many people.
I often thought Brennan was the only man on earth who could describe God’s love worthy to the task. In memory of him, I’d like to quote some of what I think are his best sayings:
♥ God loves who we really are–whether we like it or not, and calls us, as He did Adam, to come out of hiding into a safe place. No amount of spiritual makeup can render us more presentable to Him. “Come to Me now,” Jesus says. “Acknowledge and accept who I want to be for you: a Savior of boundless compassion, infinite patience, unbearable forgiveness, and love that keeps no score of wrongs.”
♥ Faith is the courage to accept acceptance.
♥ God loves you for who you are, not for who you should be.
♥ The truth of faith has little value when it is not also the life of the heart.
♥ Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.
♥ I have been seized by the power of a great affection.
♥ The Christ within who is our hope of glory is not a matter of theological debate or philosophical speculation. He is not a hobby, a part-time project, a good theme for a book, or a last resort when all human effort fails. His is our life, the most real fact about us. He is the power and wisdom of God dwelling within us.
♥ Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors.
This last quote is a long one but my favorite of all quotations; it is from his book: The Rabbi’s Heartbeat:
♥
On a recent five-day silent retreat, I spent the entire time in John’s gospel. Whenever a sentence caused my heart to stir I wrote it out longhand in a journal. The first of many entries was also the last: “The disciple Jesus loved was reclining next to Jesus. He leaned back on Jesus’ breast” (John 13:23, 25). We must not hurry past this scene in search of deeper revelation, or we will miss a magnificent insight. John lays his head on the heart of God, on the breast of the Man whom the council of Nicea defined as “being coequal and consubstantial to the Father . . . God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God.”
This can be a personal encounter, radically affecting our understanding of who God is and what our relationship with Jesus is meant to be. God allows a young Jew, reclining on the rags of his twenty-odd years, to listen to his heartbeat!
Have we ever seen the human Jesus at closer range?
Clearly, John was not intimidated by Jesus. He was not afraid of his Lord and Master. John was deeply affected by this sacred Man.
Fearing that I would miss the divinity of Jesus, I distanced myself from His humanity, like an ancient worshiper shielding his eyes from the Holy of Holies. But as John leans back on the breast of Jesus and listens to the heartbeat of the Great Rabbi, he comes to know Him in a way that surpasses mere cognitive knowledge. What a world of difference lies between knowing about someone and knowing Him.
In a flash of intuitive understanding, John experiences Jesus as the human face of God who is love. And in coming to know who the Great Rabbi is, John discovers who he is–“the disciple Jesus loved.” For John the heart of Christianity was not an inherited doctrine but a message born of his own experience. And the message he declared was, “God is love” (I John 4:16).
The recovery of passion begins with the recovery of my true self as the beloved. If I find Christ I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him . . . the goal and purpose of our lives. John did not believe that Jesus was the most important thing; he believed that Jesus was the ONLY thing.
If John were to be asked, “What is your primary identity, your most coherent sense of yourself?” he would not reply, “I am a disciple, an apostle, an evangelist,” but “I am the one Jesus loves.”
To read John 13:23-25 without faith is to read it without profit. To risk the passionate life, we must be “affected by” Jesus as John was; we must engage His experience with our lives rather than our memories. Until I lay my head on Jesus’ breast, listen to His heartbeat, and personally appropriate the Christ-experience of John’s eyewitness, I have only a derivative spirituality. The Christ of faith is no less accessible to us in His present risenness than was the Christ of history in His human flesh to the beloved disciple. To see Jesus in the flesh was an extraordinary privilege but “more blessed are they who have not seen and yet believed” (John 20:29).
Looking at Jesus through the prism of John’s values offers unique insight into the priorities of discipleship. One’s personal relationship towers over every other consideration. What establishes preeminence in the Christian community is not office, title, or territory, not the charismatic gifts of tongues, healing, or inspired preaching, but only our response to Jesus’ question, “Do you love Me?
♥♥♥
Brennan Manning knew Jesus, loved Jesus, and spent a good part of his life proclaiming the Good News — that God’s love is real, all-powerful, particular, unconditional, and crazy. (God is crazy in love with us. )
The following links are samples of Brennan Manning’s amazing gift of telling the world about God’s great love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKSofu9YlyQ&feature=player_embedded#!
