moving right along...favorite quotes and snippets from Brennan Manning's "Ruthless Trust" Chapters 2-5. (i think this may be part 3 of 5...maybe 6...we'll see). enjoy!
The person with an abiding spirit of gratitude is the one
that trusts God.
The foremost quality of a trusting disciple is
gratefulness. Gratitude arises from the
lived perception, evaluation and acceptance of all of life as grace – as an
undeserved and unearned gift from the Father’s hand. Such recognition is itself the work of grace,
and acceptance of the gift is implicitly an acknowledgement of the Giver.
Uncontaminated trust in the revelation of Jesus allows us to
breathe more freely, to dance more joyfully and to sing more gratefully about
the gift of salvation.
Magnalia Dei, the
marvels of God
It is simply not possible to be simultaneously grateful and
resentful or full of self-pity.
…somehow a great enemy had been disarmed in her life.
Walk the way of gratefulness
He knew himself to be a man possessed totally by another,
belonging totally to another, and dependent totally on another.
The grumblers live in a state of self-induced stress.
St. Benedict considered grumbling a serious offense against
community life.
To be grateful for an unanswered prayer, to give thanks in a
state of interior desolation, to trust in the love of God in the face of the
marvels, cruel circumstances,
obscenities and commonplaces of life is to whisper a doxology in darkness.
The psalms are raw, disturbing, and brutally honest. It is
to an angry and bewildered Job that God appears and speaks, and yet God
later tells the theological sophisticate Eliphaz to ask for Job’s prayers,
adding “for you have not spoken truthfully about me, as has my servant Job.”
We are, each and every one of us, insignificant people who
God has called and graced to use in a significant way. In his eyes, the high-profiles ministries are
no more significant than those that draw little or no attention and
publicity.
The glory of God is the human being fully alive and the life
of the human consists in beholding God.
– Iranaeus
The more we let go of our concepts and images which always
limit God, the bigger God grows and the more we approach the mystery of his
indefinability.
To avoid mystery is to avoid the only God worthy of worship,
honor and praise.
…we become aware of innate poverty, our next-breath
dependence, and a numbness that invades the roots of our littleness and
realness….
The scandal of God’s silence in the most heartbreaking hours
of our journey is perceived in retrospect as veiled, tender Presence and a
passage into pure trust that is not at the mercy of the response it receives.
We are drawn into the ever-deepening and more direct
awareness of the divine incomprehensibility.
To adore is to recognize the unfathomable greatness of God
and the nothingness of the adorer.
We are not sufficient unto ourselves – we have received our
life and being from another.
In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary,
somewhere deep down a Voice whispers, “All is well, and all will be well..”
Many a believer’s
perception of God is radically wrong.
As we continue to confuse our perception of ourselves with
the mystery that we really are, self-rejection is inevitable.
…lift our eyes to the extravagant beauty of God manifested
in creation.
See the world as a metaphor for God
