Brennan Manning

I love him. I just started reading the Signature of Jesus, and it's just what I need to hear right now.

"Littered along the Calvary road will lie the skeletons of our egos, the corpses of our fantasies of control, and the shards of self-righteousness, self-indulgent spirituality, and unfreedom."

"I long for passion, intelligence, and compassion in a church without ostentation, gently beckoning to the world to come and enjoy the peace and unity we possess because of the Spirit in our midst."

"But the victorious minority, unintimidated by the cultural patterns of the lockstepping majority, live and celebrate as though Jesus were near -- near in time, near in place -- the witness of our motives, our speech, and our behavior. As indeed he is."

"All that we have and are is one of the unique and never-to-be-repeated ways God has chosen to express himself in space and time. Each of us, made in his image and likeness, is yet another promise he has made to the universe that he will continue to love it and care for it."

"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 that 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." -Thomas Merton

"I pray that you will be daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, courageous enough to get burnt in the fire, and real enough to help others see that prose is not poetry, speech is not song, and tangibles, visibles, and perishables are not adequate for beings signed with the blood of the Lamb." -Brennan Manning

"As Abram leaves Haran he embarks on a journey he has never made to a land he never has seen. He sets out, not because he can predict the role he is to play in the history of salvation, but simply because of his personal experience, the spiritual experience of God speaking to him. There is no program he can detail; no insight into history with which he can support his decision; no model through which he can obtain a psychological identity. Spiritual experience has become a summons: It is God who directs. And the future is God's. God will, in time, show him the land."

"His is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, and not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future."

"If the Christian beliefs inherited from our family and passed on to us by our church tradition are not grounded in a shattering, life-changing experience of Jesus as the Christ, then the chasm between our creedal statements and our faith-experience widens and our witness is worthless. The gospel will persuade no one unless it has so convicted us that we are transformed by it."

"God calls us to break camp, abandon the comfort and security of the status quo, and embark in perilous freedom on the journey to a new Canaan."

"We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God; we must now deduce everything about God from what we do know about Jesus."