Ruthless Trust

Brennan Manning. HarperCollins 2002, Paperback, 190 pages, $13.95

I’ve been reading several books lately all at once. One is Ruthless Trust, by Brennan Manning and another is Let Your Life Speak, by Parker Palmer. What’s really been significant is the common message coming from both books (and from other sources as well). I’ve been reading a chapter in one book here and a chapter in another book there, and it’s like the authors are in conversation with each other and I’m in the room (and we’re all wondering about the mystery of authentic relationship with God).

One of the themes is identity (authenticity versus conforming or pretending). I should say that postmoderns (and I’ll accept the label in all it’s vagueness) value authenticity even if we don’t know how to live that way.

Parker Palmer writes:

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

I don’t think he’s suggesting that we are our own gods. He is writing from faith that we are uniquely made by God. As a child, he looked around and saw various living and dead heroes and decided to emulate them. He tried, probably succeeded (at the illusion), and failed ultimately: because he was trying to live “from the outside in.”

After reading Palmer, I returned to Manning who points toward Jesus and the love of the Father. Manning writes:

Jesus did not live from himself or for himself but from the graciousness of the Other, who is incomprehensibly caring….Following Jesus, the humble in heart waste little time in introspection, navel-gazing, looking in the mirror, and being anxious about their spiritual growth. Their self-acceptance without self-concern is anchored in the acceptance of Jesus in their struggle to be faithful. They fasten their attention on God.

Shortly after reading that, I penciled in the margin: “I could spend a thousand lifetimes trying to contemplate the image of God (that is me, made in God’s image). But if I turn my vision toward God, I will see the reality and source. Blinding light! I can’t look; but I can’t not look. Lord, help me to see you.”

I suspect Manning isn’t contradicting Palmer. My guess is that they get together in real life and talk about these things. In the chapter that I was reading today, “Cracked Pots,” Manning writes (with passion) about being made uniquely by God. He still counsels against self-absorption with (ouch) the following words:

Yet we serve herbal tea and Tootsie Rolls to self-absorption, which stalks us day and night and even infiltrates our dreams….beneath our inflated (or deflated) sense of self lurks the fear that we have no interior at all. Optimistic or pessimistic possibilities of life down the line mask an inner suspicion that our relationship with God is pretense and that we are merely parroting the words and feelings of others without internal conviction. A terrifying feeling of emptiness invades our hearts…Self-consciousness has seeded self-hatred.

Yet less than a page later, he writes:

…trust yourself as one entrusted by God with everything you need to live life to the full.

We are cracked pots, but we are not mistakes or second rate. We are uniquely made by God for his enjoyment and with purpose. Finally, just before the chapter ends, I see the evidence of a convergence between Palmer and Manning. Manning quotes Thomas Merton, who writes:

God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept God utters in me, if I am true to the thought in him I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere. I shall be lost in him.

If that’s too mystic, it may help to substitute “reality” for “actuality” (or just consider the idea of not having to pretend at all — with no thought of self or pretending).

Manning adds, “In patient endurance we wait for God to make clear what he wants to say through us. Such waiting demands not only alert attention but the courage to let ourselves be spoken.”

The process of knowing, trusting, and worshipping God begins with brutally honest and clear-eyed self-acceptance, not self-rejection masked as humility. If I want to see the Father God in everyday life, then I’ve got to accept that he loves me exactly the way that I am and may me this way for a purpose. This may sound trite, but it’s not. I think mostly we don’t accept it or have the slightest clue what it means.

In fact we (postmoderns) are much more confortable with pretending and living “from the outside in” than we like to admit. Later I’d like to come back and reflect on some of these things personally. For now I’ll let Parker Palmer have the last word:

Contrary to the conventions of our thinly moralistic culture, this emphasis on gladness and selfhood is not selfish. The Quaker teacher Douglas Steere was fond of saying that the ancient human question “Who am I?” leads inevitably to the equally imporang question “Whose am I?” — for there is no selfhood outside of relationship. We must ask the question of selfhood and answer it as honestly as we can, no matter where it takes us. Only as we do so can we discover the community of our lives.

Let Your Life Speak

Parker J. Palmer. Jossey-Bass 1999, Hardcover, 128 pages, $18.95