[For the past two days Manning's book has consumed my thoughts. I am absolutely enthralled and his words could not come at a better time. I'm slowly processing the book so I thought that posting my favorite quotes and soon recapping what I read would help digest the message. For those of you paying attention, originally this appeared in three posts but they were so long I thought I was posting the entire work. Here is the abridged version.]
"Morton Kelsey wrote, "The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners" (23)
"When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer." (25)
"Paul Tillich in his famous work "The Shaking of the Foundations": Grace strikes us when...year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is a as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you..." (27)
"But the salvation Jesus brought could not be earned. There could be no bargaining with God in a petty poker table atmosphere: "I have done this; therefore you owe me that." Jesus utterly destroys the juridical notion that our works demand payment in return. Our puny works do not entitle us to barter with God. Everything depends upon His good pleasure" (57)
"He knows repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven" (75)
"They do not pretend to be anything but what they are: sinners saved by grace" (82)
"Now God raised up the prophets, burned into their consciousness a lively awareness of His presence, and sent them to reveal Him in a warmer, more passionate manner" (101)
"If Israel is unfaithful, God remains faithful against all logic and all limits of justice because He is" (102)
"More pleasing to Me that all your prayers, works, and penances is that you would believe I love you" (120)
"Each encounter with a brother or a sister is a mysterious encounter with Jesus Himself" (123)
"Compassionate love is the axis of the Christian moral revolution and the only sign ever given by Jesus by which a disciple would be recognized" (158)
"Our hope, our acceptance of the invitation to the banquet, is not based on the idea that we are going to be free of pain and suffering. Rather, it is based on the conviction that we will triumph over suffering" (170)
"What a man of God longs for in a shepherd--someone daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, wild enough to be burned in the fire of love, real enough to make others see how phony we are" (177)
"The love of Christ is beyond all knowledge, beyond anything we can intellectualize or imagine. It is not a mild benevolence but a consuming fire" (209)
"Ragamuffins are the anawim of the Hebrew Scriptures--the poor in spirit who, aware of their inner poverty and emptiness, threw themselves without hesitation on the mercy of God. They compounded a sense of personal powerlessness with unfailing trust in the love of God. They were indeed the remnant, the true Israel to whom the messianic promises had been made" (214)
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