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When absolute control and rigid obedience pose as love within the family and the local faith-community , we produce trained cowards rather than Christian persons.

Brennan Manning

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Brennan Manning
Age: 75 †
Born: 1937
Born: April 27
Died: 2013
Died: April 12
Author
Catholic Priest
Theologian
New York City
New York
Richard Francis Xavier Manning
Faith
Obedience
Family
Absolutes
Cowards
Christian
Absolute
Pose
Persons
Produce
Rigid
Love
Control
Trained
Within
Coward
Community
Locals
Rather
Local

More quotes by Brennan Manning

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we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves... But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves -- unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely.
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Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.
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May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is the Father, Son and Spirit.
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God is a kooky God who can scarcely bear to be without us.
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Hope your wildest hopes, dream your maddest dreams, imagine your most fantastic fantasies. Where your hopes and your dreams and your imagination leave off, the love of my Heavenly Father only begins.
Brennan Manning
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As we come to grips with our own selfishness and stupidity, we make friends with the impostor and accept that we are impoverished and broken and realize that, if we were not, we would be God. The art of gentleness toward ourselves leads to being gentle with others -- and is a natural prerequisite for our presence to God in prayer.
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Do you honestly believe God likes you, not just loves you because theologically God has to love you?
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The ragamuffin gospel reveals that Jesus forgives sins, including the sins of the flesh that He is comfortable with sinners who remember how to show compassion but that He cannot and will not have a relationship with pretenders in the Spirit.
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To affirm a person is to see the good in them that they cannot see in themselves and to repeat it in spite of appearances to the contrary. Please, this is not some Pollyanna optimism that is blind to the reality of evil, but rather like a fine radar system that is tuned in to the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Brennan Manning
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At Sunday worship, as in every dimension of our existence, many of us pretend to believe we are sinners. Consequently, all we can do is pretend we have been forgiven. As a result, our whole spiritual life is pseudo-repentance and pseudo-bliss.
Brennan Manning
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Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don’t have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.
Brennan Manning
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Ragamuffins are simple, direct and honest. Their speech is unaffected. They are slow to claim, God told me... As they make their way through the world, they bear wordless, prophetic witness.
Brennan Manning
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Ruthless trust ultimately comes down to this: faith in the person of Jesus and hope in his promise.
Brennan Manning
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The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.
Brennan Manning
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While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.
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By and large, the gospel of grace is neither proclaimed, understood, nor lived.
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The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.
Brennan Manning
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Faith will become vision, hope will become possession, but the love of Jesus Christ that is stronger than death endures forever. In the end, it is the only thing you can hang onto.
Brennan Manning
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The most powerful thing that can happen in the place of prayer is that you yourself become the prayer. You leave the prayer room able as Jesus' hands and feet on earth. This is what it means to pray continually (without ceasing), to see with the eyes of Jesus and to hear with His ears with every waking moment.
Brennan Manning
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Choose a single, sacred word or phrase that captures something of the flavor of your intimate relationship with God. A word such as Jesus, Abba, Peace, God or a phrase such as Abba, I belong to you. . . . Without moving your lips, repeat the sacred word inwardly, slowly, and often.
Brennan Manning