Brennan Manning, A Glimpse of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 2003); The Wisdom of Tenderness (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 2002); and The Ragamuffin Gospel (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah, 2000)

         After decades of traversing the country ministering and speaking to thousands of believers, Brennan Manning has developed a firm and disturbing conviction about what he calls a “pandemic” and “dominant malaise” among Christians: most people do not have the settled confidence that God loves them fully, truly, and without conditions or limits.  We fear to present ourselves to God as what Henri Nouwen once called the “unadorned self.”  Instead of accepting God’s acceptance, we lapse into various permutations of the Horatio Alger ideal of reward for hard effort.  We try to appease God.  We wrongly think He expects us to be perfect, never without a compromising thought, word, feeling or action.  This standard is unattainable, of course, but still we soldier on in “the struggle to maintain a hollow image of a perfect self.”  Since few people in life treat us with unmerited mercy, perhaps this propensity is natural and understandable.  But as Manning points out, it is a game we can never win.

         Manning is one of those authors who, thank God, keeps writing the same book over and over.  He reminds us of God’s unconditional and unfailing love.  He encourages us not to fear our fears about ourselves.  He pesters us to live free of the opinions of others, and even our own opinions about ourselves.  We no longer need hide our frailties but can instead admit that we are bent, broken, bruised, fallen, a bundle of paradoxes” and even a mystery to ourselves.  Why did we ever think otherwise?  At one and the same time we can become more aware of but less threatened by our inner conflicts.

         The Christian, says Manning, should live with the palpable and “impeccable sense of feeling safe” before God.  In turn, we learn to treat ourselves with tenderness and kindness.  In short, in most all his books Manning leads us to a simple and powerful message put succinctly in 1 John 4:16: “For we have come to know and believe the love that God has for us.”