From the introduction:
I’m Brennan. I’m an alcoholic.How I got there, why I left there, why I went back, is thestory of my life.But it is not the whole story.
I’m Brennan. I’m a Catholic. How I got there, why I left there, why I went back, is also thestory of my life. But it is not the whole story.
I’m Brennan. I was a priest, but am no longer a priest. I was amarried man but am no longer a married man. How I got to those places, why I left those places, is the storyof my life too. But it is not the whole story.
I’m Brennan. I’m a sinner, saved by grace.That is the larger and more important story.Only God, in His fury, knows the whole of it.

Wow! What a way to start a book! This book is for everyone – everyone who wants to know that God loves them, that is. It’s great to read (and re-read) Brennan Manning’s books. They provide the much needed perspective that many churches and Christians are lacking in today’s culture – GRACE coupled with a deep and un-restricted LOVE! It’s amazing how much we allow the thoughts and expectations of others to cloud the knowledge that God loves us in a furious and un-stoppable way.

I’m with Brennan (and many other authors) who call us to live a life that is worthy of the Love lavishly given to us. Brennan says (on page 119) that “we have all experienced the sadness of a Christian life that is secure, well regulated, but basically impoverished. We long, at least occasionally, for a generosity that would lift us above ourselves.” This book is another call to recognize the Love of God in our lives and to live that Love out in our everyday-ness.

We no longer have to live a defeated life and the expectations and limitations placed on us by our society no longer have to contain the love that should (and will) overflow from our hearts as we experience the Furious Longing of God to LOVE us with an unreasonable love!

Whew! What a reminder!

Indicative – The book was a little hard to get into at first. His style takes some adjusting. My wife read the book as well and had a little difficulty until about the halfway point and then she enjoyed it much better. Manning tends to be a little choppy, the chapters are short and it is a quick read. But if you really digest what is there the read could take much longer as Manning is able to chock more meaning into as few of words as anyone I have read. His message of God’s love and longing for his people is unmistakable and it is difficult to walk away from this read without feeling an inherent sense of self-worth and appreciation for God’s view of us. There are several stories and illustrations from this book that will be with me the rest of my life. What is more, he doesn’t stick with how God views us…he also moves from the response that should elicit in us toward others.

Imperative – Go and buy a copy of this book. Read it. Apply it. Live it. Understand God that much more.

Subjunctive – You may or may not like the first few chapters of the book due to his style. If you read this book you may want to follow it up by reading Raggamuffin Gospel. That might just be as good of a read as the Furius Longing of God.

Optative – May you be blessed by your reading of this book. May you go to the link above and purchase many books from amazon during your visit.

This book was good enough that my wife is going to let someone borrow it this Sunday. I think it is going to make the rounds at church.

Yet, Manning never moves deeper than images and anecdotes. Don’t get me wrong, the images are beautiful and the anecdotes are inspiring. I simply feel that the book market is flooded with such writing. Christian book stores need more depth. Our churches need more depth.

This book provides for great devotional reading. I read it a chapter at a time each morning, though the book is small and could be read in simply a few sittings. Those looking for an inspirational short story will find many in this work. Those looking to set sail and wade through the waters of the furious longing of God will walking away wanting more. On the other hand, that may be a good thing…

Yet, Manning never moves deeper than images and anecdotes. Don’t get me wrong, the images are beautiful and the anecdotes are inspiring. I simply feel that the book market is flooded with such writing. Christian book stores need more depth. Our churches need more depth.

This book provides for great devotional reading. I read it a chapter at a time each morning, though the book is small and could be read in a simply a few sittings. Those looking for an inspirational short story will find many in this work. Those looking to set sail and wade through the waters of the furious longing of God will walking away wanting more. One the other hand, that may be a good thing…

Until the love of God that knows no boundary, limit, or breaking point is internalized through personal decision; until the furious longing of God seizes the imagination; until the heart is conjoined to the mind through sheer grace, nothing happens.

Nothing happens. Nothing that matters happens in you. Nothing that matters happens through you. Nothing happens to transform you, to heal you, to wake you up to the dawn of the life God has in store for you.

Brennan Manning wants something to happen. Brennan Manning wants something to happen for you. And so he pulls out all the stops — emotional, rhetorical, poetic — to push you and prod you and upset you and compel you to open your eyes and heart and soul to see the love, the real and powerful and vibrant and furiously intense love, God has for you.

But that’s not quite right. It is God that wants something to happen in you! Brennan is merely trying to serve as the messenger, to point, to reveal, to pull back the curtain, to try to express what cannot be rightly expressed, but to hint at it poignantly enough to bring us to look for ourselves.

If the book has a fault, it is that sometimes Manning’s “cuteness,” his toying with language to try to stretch it to say what cannot be said, his use of stories about himself which are mostly rather unflattering, sometimes get in the way and may be distracting, making us think about him instead of the One to whom he points.

And, yet, I cannot really fault him for the way he has done the book. You can’t get at personal relationship impersonally. You cannot hint at, point at, the transforming love of God by being scholarly. You have to get personal. You have to be, not just the teacher, but the messenger, the one who can say, “Can you see what I see?”

The book is not scholarly, not an essay or a treatise, but more a collection of reflections and meditations and prayers and poems. I did appreciate, however, Manning frequent use of quotations from other authors, from other Christians, from other pilgrims. One of my favorites was this ironic observation from Gerald May:

The entire process (of self-development) can be very exciting and entertaining. But the problem is there’s no end to it. The fantasy is that if one heads in the right direction and just works hard enough to learn new things and grows enough and gets actualized, one will be there. None of us is quite certain exactly where there is, but it obviously has something to do with resting.

And then there are the lines from Rich Mullins’ song, The Love of God, one of the sources for the title of Manning’s book:

In the reckless, raging fury
that they call the love of God.

That is the relentless refrain of this book: open yourself to the love of God for you! The essence of our faith is not about what we can do for God, but about what God has done, what God is doing for us. It is a book about God, a book that hopes to lead you, the reader, into God’s embrace, a book that urges you and entices you, not to know about God, but to know God.

It is there, in the embrace of God’s love, that our wounds are healed, and it is there that we may become healers, instruments of God’s peace … which is our intended vocation!

God loves you like crazy.

To me, that’s one message that we just can’t hear enough and can’t be reminded of enough. Someone, i forget who, once said that “Sometimes we need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed.” Brennan Manning seems to take this advice and I’m thankful.

God. Loves. You. Like. Crazy.

We’d do well to let this messages sit with us every morning for the rest of our lives. Not suprisingly, Manning alludes to the fact that many people who give him a hard time for talking about God’s love too much. I guess i understand where they are coming from (maybe) but man, can we really talk too much of God’s love?

When it comes down to it, this is a good book for what Manning intended it for. I don’t think he was writing a comprehensive theological treatise on the love of God. I think he’s trying to write something that makes you begin all over again to come to terms with the fact that God love you like crazy.

if that was really his goal, i think he did well.

I’m happy to suggest this book to people who are having a hard time wrapping their minds around God’s unbelievable love for them.

But I kept plodding along thinking I will catch on soon, I will find my way into this conversation. And then it happened. Manning is telling the story of a woman who is dying of leprosy named Yolanda. Yolanda is so happy when he comes to visit her and he can’t comprehend why, after all she is sick and dying of this wretched disease. So Manning asks her and she tells him that her Abba has told her that she will be taken home today. I was crying but then the tears became tears of joy because Yolanda understood the simple yet amazing truth – God’s love.

It took the simple story of a profound moment in one woman’s life (and in Manning’s life) to help me to grasp the fullness of that which is ungraspable. God’s enormous, gigantic, swirling, moving, life-changing, furious love. As Manning continues this is the center of all that he is proclaiming. The simplicity of this one truth is so moving that his writing moves in a similar frenetic, all but senseless flow from one story to another. And I, the one who values order and simplicity, was lost until I allowed the fury to take me up into the movement. I had to give up control to hear the proclamation that Manning has given his life to – God is love and if longing for each of us, all of us to be caught up in this moving, furious experience that is the love of God.

The title kind of threw me off because coming from a Pentecostal, holiness or Hell background, the only time I heard the words “fury” and “God” used in the same sentence was when some red faced pastor was referring to the furious wrath of God on sinners. Never, ever did I hear a sermon preached on the idea that God ravenously searches for me, longs to be with me and furiously love me with an everlasting love!

I could say a lot of things but that is the essence of this book…God loves you…period, end of sentence. Manning spends 131 pages driving in the point that “I am my Beloved’s and His desire is for me.” (Song of Solomon 7:10) We, in the church, have become adept at a lot of things…worship/preaching/marketing/programs….but we seem to have forgotten that “the only thing that matters is the faith that expresses itself in love.”(p.88) Manning so eloquently argues that if we could get back to the simple, innocent idea of “Jesus loves me, this I know” and allow that love to engulf us, we could get back to the job of changing the world.

I want to end the review with this quote from the book: “The wild, unrestricted love of God is not simply an inspiring idea. When it imposes itself on mind and heart with the stark reality of ontological truth, it determines why and at what time you get up in the morning, how you pass your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, and who you hang with; it affects what breaks your heart, what amazes you, and what makes your heart happy.” Wow! I highly recommend this short but extremely powerful book!

Having read a number of Manning’s other works, “Ragamuffin Gospel,” “Ruthless Trust,” and “The Importance of Being Foolish,” I didn’t find much in here that was new. That being said it was restated in an extremely helpful and accessible way.

If you are in need of being reminded how much God loves you then this is a must read book. It is easily digested, doesn’t take long to read and is guaranteed to refresh your life and relationship with God. As a pastor I know this will be one of those books that I end up giving away again and again and again.

God has called mankind to a love relationship as Manning describes, but there are privileges and responsibilities that accompany any relationship. To focus on one without the other is unbalanced. My faithfulness or unfaithfulness to my responsibilities in no way decreases my Father’s love, which is what I understand Manning to be presenting in this book. God’s love for me does mean that He will guide me in righteousness and truth and will discipline me in order to help me stay on the path of wisdom, which is an ultimate expression of a Father’s love. This is the area in which I note a weaker or unbalanced presentation by Manning.

For the purpose of highlighting God’s unconditional love and getting us to rethink our traditional man-made paradigms, Manning does a good job and I appreciate the challenge. Charlotte Elliot wrote the words to the famous hymn, Just as I Am, and this thought keeps coming back to me. God longs for me just as I am and with no waxing and waning of His love, I can rest in His presence. Manning highlights the truth that God longs for us and this longing is evident through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I may not agree with all of Manning’s theology, but this is a book that strives to help us grasp the truth of God’s unconditional love.

The book I received to review is Brennan Manning’s “the furious longing of God.” You can check out the foreword, intro and first chapter of the book here courtesy of David C. Cook Publishing.

I had never read anything by Manning before so I wasn’t sure what to expect from the book. What drew me to this book was the following description from the back of the book:

“Imagine a stormy day at sea, your ship yielding to a relentless wind, pummeled by crashing waves, subject to the awesome force of nature. A force that is both fierce and majestic. A power that is nothing short of furious.

Such is God’s intense, consuming love for his children. It’s a love that knows no limits, and no boundaries. A love that will go to any lengths, and take any risks, to pursue us.”

Most of the time storms are used as a metaphor for difficulties in life, and Jesus shows up to calm the storm. This is the first time I had come across someone using a stormy sea as a picture of God’s longing for us. What a picture–God’s love as something as passionate, undpredictable and dangerous as a storm at sea!

One of the overarching themes throughout the book is the fact that God loves us (and even likes us) regardless of who we are. There is nothing that can make God love us less, and there is nothing we can do to make God love us more. Because of that kind of reckless love, Manning calls us to abandon our “striving” to gain God’s approval and simply and recklessly love God back.

As we learn to give God our love more than anything else, Manning reminds us that then manifests itself in our love of those around us. Manning states that we are called to a ministry of healing. Now, when I read that it took me a second to put aside pictures of charismatic meetings where people are prayed for and healed of their ailments. Manning is talking about restoration. As lovers of God, we are called to give that restorative love to those around us, especially those we have deemed unlovable (and even annoying).

I was struck by the deliberateness of Manning’s choice of words throughout the book. Don’t let this book’s deceptive brevity (136 pages) lull you into thinking there is little content within it’s pages. There were many times I had to stop and reread a sentence to get the full breadth of what Manning was trying to say.

To say something like, “I thoroughly enjoyed the book” feels like a trite description for my impression of “the furious longing of God.” I was challenged, convicted and encouraged (can you be all those things at the same time?) by what Manning had to say concerning God’s love and, in turn, how I manifest that love to those around me. I highly recommend this book to people anywhere on their spiritual journey desiring to learn, grow in greater understanding of, or even be reminded of God’s furious love for his creation.

And because it wasn’t until I wrote that very paragraph that realized any of this, I was ready to rip The Furious Longing of God by Brennan Manning a new one.

The evisceration went something like this: “Brennan Manning’s new book follows up his squishy self-help ethos laid out in Ragamuffin. Manning confirms for the church once again that everything is OK because God loves you a lot. Gosh darn it, God likes us! So much that Manning’s book needs a video trailer. You know, because sometimes life’s like you’re stuck in a little boat in a big sea.”

I know.

And then I read the book.

Brilliantly written it is not. The odd switches between typeface, the strangely unordered chapters, the small-group questions that interrupt, the conviction that scripture be quoted in all caps, the shifts between the personal “I” and the all-seeing “I” point of view were all jarring. But I was willing to forgo all of this after page 17, when Manning writes so simply:

I’m Brennan. I’m a sinner, saved by grace.

That is the larger and more important story.

Only God in His fury, knows the whole of it.

I sat with this final sentence for two days, and when I picked the book up again I realized that The Furious Longing of God had inadvertently become my compline prayer. I began patching sections of Manning’s text into prayers, like:

The one thing I owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything.

I am blessed. My soul’s winter is over. I am blessed! The love of God is folly!

As I make my life a pattern of prayer, may these prayers make my life more like You so I simply do the next thing in love.

These prayers hold at their centers the conviction that “only God, in His fury, knows the whole of it.” That the stuff of our spiritual lives goes unsaid, for it can never be said. It can only be known. The best of friendships, according to my dear friend Kristin, are all in the knowing. I think the same is true of our lives with God. Which is way Manning’s book became the centerpiece of my prayers this week. Perhaps it explains too why Manning’s book clunks from one chapter to the next, from one block of text in caps to another in italics. What words can communicate the things that can only be known? What words are enough to fumble towards the ineffable? What can be said from the center of a storm?

How do you define God? Growing up I alternated between an angry god, quick to smite unbelievers, and a boring god who only enjoyed church services. Manning writes of the many false gods that he has rejected over the years: “So much of what was presented to me as real in bygone days, I now see as fictitious. The splenetic god of alternating moods, the prejudiced god partial to Catholics, the irritated god disgusted with believers, the warrior god of the ‘just’ war, the fickle god of casuistic morality, tut-tutting our little weaknesses, the pedantic god of the spirituality sophisticated, the myriads of gods who imprisoned me in the house of fear; I could go on” (37). False image or not, we will become like the god we worship. In my case for instance, I used to be extremely judgmental and critical of people different than me. The “other” was something to be changed or defeated. Would an angry god want it any other way?

If there is one thing I will take away from this book, it is that I cannot underestimate God’s love. I often think of love as an emotional state or an attribute; Manning reminded me that love is the very definition of God: “The foundation of the furious longing of God is the Father who is the originating Lover, the Son who is the full expression of that Love, and the Spirit who is the original and inexhaustible activity of that Love, drawing the created universe into itself” (38). God is love. Has a nice ring, doesn’t it?

Love changes everything! In the course of reading this book, I reflected in my journal: “Since God loves me unconditionally, I can love others, too.” I do not experience God’s love so that I can condemn and judge others. Nor do I experience it as a means to minimize or deny my bad behavior. Manning writes, “The wild, unrestricted love of God is not simply an inspiring idea. When it imposes itself on mind and heart with the stark reality of ontological truth, it determines why and at what time you get up in the morning, how you pass your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, and who you hang with; it affects what breaks your heart, what amazes you, and what makes your heart happy” (75). There is a big world out there often wanting for love. Because God loves me, I can freely give and receive love—one of the most primary human needs. It will not always be easy. Manning certainly does not candy-coat how hard it is to truly love, but he does offer hope: “It is natural to feel fear and insecurity when confronted with the radical demands of Christian commitment. But enveloped in the lived truth of God’s furious love, insecurity is swallowed up in the solidarity of agape, and anguish and fear give way to hope and desire” (120).

The Furious Longing of God caused me to reevaluate my life through a lens of God’s love. My fragile sense of self habitually keeps me pondering how I “measure up”—but this book left me thinking more about “[doing] the next thing in love” (66) day by day. Religion, self-improvement, and strategies for growth are all poor substitutes for simply accepting God’s love. Recommended reading.

Brennan Manning’s book comes from the experience of one who has be invited into the life of Abba by Jesus in the Holy Spirit. Manning knows the unknowable. He knows his words are pointers only. Words like furious, union, longing of God. He knows that this all begins in grace. It is God’s faithfulness not ours that is primary.

This articulation for me is the central strength of the book and is worth reading (and more importantly actually meditating upon) for this alone. For those whose experience of Christianity has been about whether your personal faith and actions measure up to some standard, leaving you inevitably disheartened, even despairing, then his words are one of comfort. They are indeed good news.

That said, I do (in light of charity I hope) have some critiques of the book. First a somewhat minor one. Manning states that only Jesus had revealed that God is truly Father. This is not correct. The mystical reading of the Song of Solomon (The Song of Songs) that permeates so much of Manning’s spirituality where God is seen as the Bridegroom and the Soul as his Bride predates Jesus. A Jewish mystic by the name of Honi the Circle Drawer similarly called God Abba and was considered to be a miralce worker with a special most intimate relationship to God.

A more serious critique. Manning interprets his deep unitive experience through the lens of the ragamuffin. Which at its worst reinforces the individualistic ego our of (post)modern times by saying “You are loved just as you are.” This is not again to reinforce the notion of a ‘works salvation’ or create a new standard of the holy/sinner, but just that coming out of The Deep with God, there are ways that more properly express (and thereby deepen) that experience and ways I think that do not. While I grasp Manning’s more Luther-like personality, revealing in paradoxical language, the fury of God, language meant to shake us out of our normal thought patterns, maybe some more of Calvin and Ignatius (Loyola) are needed on the far side of this grace.

Manning does have moments when he grasps the importance of this point.

For example: (p.75)

“The wild unrestricted love of God is not simply an inspiring idea. When it imposes itself on mind and heart with the stark reality of ontological truth, it determines why and at what time you get up in the morning, how you pass your evenings, how your spend your weekends, what you read, and who you hang with; it affects what breaks your heart, what amazes you, and what makes you happy.”

I agree but that doesn’t exactly sound ragamuffin-ish to me. I wish he would have spent more time on this point. How do we know when are lives are becoming conformed/turned into the likeness of the image of God which we always are (but perhaps have not yet lived to the fullest)? How do we discern not just as individuals but as a community? On that last point, this work to me is somewhat too inner-individual focused. But I understand that not every book can do everything. Certainly not a book on our Christian faith.

My personal disagreements aside, it comes from someone who has known God. Who has been known by God. Who knows that he can not know The One who knows him. And yet loves (and is loved) nonetheless.

“God Almighty shares through His Son the depth of His feelings for me, His love flashes into my soul, and I am overtaken by mystery. These are moments of kairos — the decisive inbreak of God’s fury into my personal life’s story.”

“Our religion never begins with what we do for God. It always starts with what God has done for us, the great and wondrous things that God dreamed of and achieved for us in Christ Jesus.”

This is just a small sample of the love story shared in the pages of this short book. It is a book that you will want to leave on your coffee table, to share with others, and to give as gifts, knowing that as you share the book, you are sharing the most important truth there is, “Abba, I belong to you.”

“God Almighty shares through His Son the depth of His feelings for me, His love flashes into my soul, and I am overtaken by mystery. These are moments of kairos — the decisive inbreak of God’s fury into my personal life’s story.”

“Our religion never begins with what we do for God. It always starts with what God has done for us, the great and wondrous things that God dreamed of and achieved for us in Christ Jesus.”

This is just a small sample of the love story shared in the pages of this short book. It is a book that you will want to leave on your coffee table, to share with others, and to give as gifts, knowing that as you share the book, you are sharing the most important truth there is, “Abba, I belong to you.”