Everyone has felt too far from God to deserve his love, too tired to get up again. It was for these people that American writer Brennan Manning devoted his entire life, writing about a God who loves before any merit is earned.
Born Richard Francis Xavier Manning in 1934 in Brooklyn, he grew up in a poor family during the Depression years. After two years of studies at St. John’s University, he served as a Marine in the Korean War, and in February 1956 he had a profound experience of the personal love of Jesus Christ, which deepened his commitment to Catholicism.
He studied philosophy and theology and was ordained a Franciscan priest in 1963. In the late 1960s, he joined the Little Brothers of Jesus, a community devoted to contemplative life among the poor, working as a bricklayer and dishwasher in France and living for months in a cave in the Zaragoza desert in Spain.
Throughout his life, Manning struggled with severe alcoholism, marked by treatment at a rehabilitation clinic in 1975 and relapses in the following decades, which led him to leave the Franciscan order in 1982. He himself publicly admitted to having been, in his own words, promiscuous, dishonest, and arrogant before finding rest in the mercy of Christ.
He married Roslyn Ann Walker in 1982, but the marriage ended in divorce in 2000, and his struggle with drinking stayed with him until the end of his life. Even so, he turned his frailty into raw material for writing about grace, without hiding his own failures.
In 1990, he published The Ragamuffin Gospel, his best known work, arguing that the gospel is good news precisely for failures, the weary, and those who feel unworthy. The book became essential reading for anyone carrying shame or spiritual exhaustion.
His friendship with singer Rich Mullins, who took part in a silent retreat he led, helped spread this message through contemporary Christian music as well. Manning died in 2013 in New Orleans with Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a neurological disorder linked to chronic alcohol use, but his books continue to be read by those seeking to start over in grace rather than in their own effort.
