I first read Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel when I was still a more-or-less devoted-but-frustrated Catholic, unknowingly leaning toward the emergent church. I didn’t know then why I liked it so much, and I think the reason I didn’t know is because I was an intellectual Catholic or a Catholic intellectual, 1 of the 2. Still not entirely sure when I gave up and stopped being Catholic, but I guess I could do no other, at some point. Anyway, back to the topic sentence: I read it and absorbed the basic message, because my devotion to Rich Mullins (which persists to this day) prepared me to receive it. Here is said basic message:

When I get honest, I admit that 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 [and, if I may interject, so did Swift] I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, “A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.” (25)

Here is what I could not understand at the time: the experience of God and the doctrine of Christianity are 2 different things. The doctrine of sanctification (or justification), both Catholic and Protestant flavors, does its best to convince people that once they’ve done X, they are saved and no longer have to deal with the guilt of sin. Confession to a priest or to God clears it up, and we can be happy again. Hell, it might even get easier along the way.

Didn’t you know that virtue is formed purely by good habits?

Yeah, call me when that works out for you.

And the postmodern snark returns. I’m not really as angry as my snark implies, but I’m just now understanding how screwed up I can be. I continue to believe that religious literacy is essential, and I’m not impressed with churches that don’t teach their doctrine, including, yes, their very own doctrine of sanctification (or justification). But Manning and other wily postmoderns (ha!) have shown me, over several years, that knowing a doctrine does not necessarily lead to the assurance of salvation or the removal of guilt, even if the doctrine itself is actually true (which I do not dispute).

I know this is true because I’ve never had a spiritual experience while reading a doctrinal work. This includes works of mysticism (eg, St. Augustine’s Confessions and St. Theresa of Avila’s Autobiography). But I felt an overwhelming, almost out-of-body connection to the following sentences from Douglas Coupland’s Life After God:

My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love. (359)

Life After God is an exploration of what happens to a generation (mine) when the assumption God is removed from it by the previous generation. Coupland charts the resulting spiritual emptiness and hunger for satisfying spirituality. I came to understand religion relatively late in my life (but not necessarily late for my generation); I feel I am only now beginning to understand God, and it’s been through unorthodox experiences initiated by artistic expression. When I read Coupland, I understood my brokenness better than before, and I wouldn’t have gained that understanding via a lecture on original sin.

This is why discerning bloggers and Truly Reformed pundits will always miss the point when reading Manning. I don’t think doctrine is unimportant, and I don’t think Manning does either. He’s a Catholic mystic at heart (stole that from iMonk), which means that he’s absorbed the portions of doctrine worth keeping and expresses it artistically. His books aren’t arguments for Grace, they’re examples of Grace working through a broken sinner to reach other broken sinners, all of whom don’t need convincing that they’re sick and can’t make it alone. They need to be shown.

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Coupland, Douglas. Life After God. New York: Washington Square, 2005.

Manning, Brennan. The Ragmamuffin Gospel. Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2005.

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