As noted in the forthcoming conversation, care of the soul is in these days—maybe too in. Tons of books, seminars, manuals, gurus and formulas are supposed to put us all in touch with that fragile, often overlooked part of our beings. With so many voices and ideas, why aren’t they working better? Why isn’t God drawing near to us?
Perhaps this is a better question: Why aren’t we drawing near to God? Brennan Manning and Mike Yaconelli were longtime friends who had many interests in common—foremost among them being the mystery of God, intimacy with Jesus, and care of the soul. To both these men, these issues were just that—issues. Still, as they both admit here, any ground they gained in their journeys toward the heart of Christ often was met with deeper rivers to cross and darker nights to endure. Herein lie only their observations, but as you take a peek at some snapshots of their encounters with the Eternal, hopefully you’ll gain a better handle—or maybe a different perspective—on ways you can start bringing your own spiritual picture into focus.
YouthWorker Journal: What does care of the soul mean to you?
Brennan Manning: My first reflection on the care of the soul begs the questions: What does my soul need? What is crucial for my soul not just to survive, but to thrive? Any discussion of the care of the soul would have to confront the demon of busyness. Mother Teresa of Calcutta [said], “We need to find God, and He cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is a friend of silence. See how nature, trees, flowers, grass grow in silence? See the stars, the moon, the sun, how they move in silence? Is it not our mission to give God to the poor—and not a dead god, but a living, loving God? The more we receive in a silent prayer, the more we can give in our active lives. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. All our words will be useless unless they come from within. Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.”
One of the temptations I’ve struggled with my whole life is being a people-pleaser. This morning, the issue was to go to Mike Yaconelli’s Bible study or spend an hour in silence in my room. The people-pleaser part of me wanted to come to the Bible study, but my soul said, “Grow still. Be alone.” That’s why now I don’t accept invitations to speak at breakfasts, because if that time is gone, the day is kind of shot.
Mike Yaconelli: A Lutheran pastor blew me away this summer with this thought: When Elijah went up the mountain and there was fire and wind, he was depressed. Then there was the still, small voice of God. In Hebrew, that word means “a thin silence.” Whoa! That’s what it’s like caring for our souls—getting quiet enough to hear the thin silence of God. The point is that it doesn’t take much noise and activity to drown out that thin silence.
Manning: The real schism I see in the North American church is not between conservatives and liberals, or between fundamentalists and charismatics—it’s between the aware and the unaware. There are people walking around today with lively, conscious awareness of what G.K. Chesteron called “the furious love of God.” They live in a consistent state of awareness of God. Then there are others who are utterly unaware. There’s no sense of God animating everything they do because they’re just too busy to enter into that inward stillness and hear the voice that whispers, “Shhh…don’t be afraid. I’m here. No loss is lasting. No defeat more than transitory. You’re mine.”
I’m bewildered when anybody says, “I love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength,” and yet they don’t give God their time. It’s the most precious thing I’ve got to give anybody.
Mrs. Brennan was the mother of one of my closest friends. She died a few years ago at 91, a widow. She lived in Chicago, and I’ve traveled there four or five times a year in the past 30 years. I’ve got friends there my own age—we spend time together, pray, go to movies—but never once in those 30 years did I not spend a night at Mrs. Brennan’s house. The next morning, we always had coffee, talked for three hours, then prayed. If you asked her, “Does Brennan love you?” she’d say, “I’d bet my life on it.” “Why?” “Because he always shows up.”
Like Woody Allen said, “90 percent of life is just showing up.” It’s, “Here I am. No big agenda. No dazzling, peak experience—I just want to be with you.”
YWJ: Some in the church might say if you’re merely hanging out with God, you’re not really fulfilling the Great Commission. You’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.
Yaconelli: I think it’s because we’re scared to death of intimacy. We’re bothered by the question, “What am I supposed to do? Just sit here?” We’re scared to death that if we do encounter God, nothing will happen—or something amazing will happen. We’re not sure, and so we end up avoiding the unknowns of intimacy, silence and solitude. We take what we know rather than what we don’t know.
Manning: Ignatius Loyola, one of the great masters of the interior life, said, “The greatest gift you can ever receive from God is an intimate, heartfelt relationship with Jesus Christ.” I was ambushed by Jesus in 1956 in a little chapel in Pennsylvania—it’s almost trite to say that my life actually began then, but that’s what happened. Prior to that, I was just bouncing from tavern to tavern, looking for love in the wrong arms. To me, Christianity was an ethic, a moral code, memorizing passages, a duty-oriented thing; but that day, it became a love affair, everything changed. I think a lot of us don’t want that. We don’t want intimacy because the rigorous demands of a love relationship leave us with little time for ourselves, projects and pursuits. So we end up keeping God at a distance, and our Christianity slowly turns into merely a moral or ethical code.
Yaconelli: When we really want intimacy, it changes everything. It doesn’t just change the hour of the morning—it changes how I relate to the guy next to me, what I think of my boss, how I view youth ministry. It’s a lifetime—a continual battle, a struggle. It’s not immediate by any means. It’s very dangerous because it’s inefficient, and it changes how we measure things—or if we even do measure things. As much as we love to talk about intimacy, if we really started getting serious about it, intimacy with God could lead us all to the unemployment lines.
I mean, if you’re measuring up in the eyes of the church, a conversation might go like this: “So, how’s the youth group going?” “Well, we have 40 kids, but when we started a year ago, we had 20.” “OK, you’re doing great!” If you really start listening to God, and God takes you away from your work, the conversation might go, “So, how’s the youth group going?” “Well, I’m closer to God today than I was a year ago, and I have the same number of kids.” “Well, what are we paying you for—what are you doing?”
Manning: A youth minister might say this to a pastor: “An integral part of my ministry is intercessory prayer for the kids, so one day a month I’m going to a retreat center to spend 24 hours in silence and solitude. This is not a day off—it’s part of what I’m being paid to do.”
The pastor responds, “That’s impossible! Taking a day off to be alone with God seems like a waste of time when there are so many pressing, urgent needs.”
Yaconelli: Right now, care of the soul is in. All the books are starting to come out with stuff on the soul; but if you look at it carefully, it’s all really a repackaging of what it’s supposed to be against—and unfortunately, it’s still all about doing.
What if youth ministry had nothing to do with morals—whether the kids are having sex or taking drugs? What if instead it meant getting them somehow to listen to the voice of God? What if that was the definition of youth ministry? What does that do to the whole paradigm we have out there?
YWJ: So you’re proposing pushing aside the mechanical processes we see as so valuable?
Yaconelli: Right. The process itself is incidental. The real issue is: How do I get my kids to pay attention to the God who’s right here, right now, whispering to them, trying to get their attention?
There’s a wonderful story about a 4-year-old who’s overheard whispering to her newborn baby brother, “Baby, tell me what God sounds like. I’m starting to forget.” Wow! What if the kids in our youth group have forgotten how to recognize God’s voice? What can we do about it? That idea’s so foreign. You don’t learn how to teach that by going to a seminar or seminary.
Manning: Last week I led five Seventh-day Adventists in silent retreat, and when we began, the feeling was, “We’re going to grow silent and then wait for God to make His move.” The great discovery was, in growing silent, we’re just becoming aware of the moves God already is making.
Yaconelli: Yeah! It’s not like God is running around, and we’re trying to catch up with Him. God is close. It’s all about recognizing and paying attention and listening to where God is.
Manning: That’s why it’s lousy theology when the hymns say, “Let’s enter into the presence of God.” If we weren’t in the presence of God, we’d be annihilated! Instead, we ought to say, “Let’s become aware of God’s presence that’s right here, right now.”
Yaconelli: John Claypool tells a story about his daughter Laura as a very young girl. One night he’s putting his kids to bed, looking forward to his sanity break for a couple of hours. After two stories and three trips to the bathroom, he finally gets Laura to bed. Then he goes into his study and just comes alive while working on this little writing project. It’s late—11 or 11:30 p.m. Suddenly, he senses Laura in the room. She’s standing there, looking at him, and he’s irritated. Finally, he stops and says, “Laura, what do you want?” She says, “Nothing, Daddy. I just want to be close to you.”
That’s shocking news. We expect Jesus to say, “Well, you don’t have enough kids in this youth group. I want you to go save some more kids. I want you to be more available for counseling. I want you to do a confirmation class.”
No! Jesus is saying, “I just want to be close to you. That’s all.” That just changes everything. When we talk about care of the soul, we’re not talking about changing a couple of things—we’re talking about never being the same. Your whole life is turned upside down. That’s what happens when you start caring for your soul.
YWJ: It’s been said that God is a God of order. The universe has a clear purpose. Things happen a certain way for certain reasons. There are laws; there are schedules; there are lists of things to do, and God is pleased with that because God is a God of order.
Manning: Well, who’s in control? Is it my sense of order, or is it God’s sense of order?
Yaconelli: The concept of God being a god of order is fundamentally wrong and a complete and total distortion of the gospel and of who God is. All you need to do is read the life of Jesus. It doesn’t make any sense! I mean, He keeps making wrong moves, wrong choices. At least, they certainly appear to be wrong. Everything is going great, the crowds are coming, then He says, “I’m going to Jerusalem, and I’m going to die.” They’re going, “What do You mean? You’re going to die? You’re crazy!” Order is all about power and control, and much of the church is, too, unfortunately. I’m convinced it has nothing to do with money—acquiring money is only the way we get power. The whole nature of intimacy is powerlessness. When we say we shouldn’t care about power, we’re speaking a foreign language. Being close to God means I don’t care about power, who’s who and ego. I’m certainly not trying to make my life make sense to everybody—I have another order.
YWJ: Right down to things such as church services—which happen at a certain time with a certain program. There are instructions and steps and benedictions—all these ordered kinds of things. It sounds as if you’re saying God doesn’t care about that stuff.
Yaconelli: We are so seduced by our culture and caught up in its values. Here’s something radical for you: A little girl in my church named Maria doesn’t have a very extensive church background, and every Sunday sometime during my sermon, she raises her hand. The people around her get irritated—we’re not a charismatic church—she just always has a question. Because we’re a small church, you can’t ignore her. Finally, I stop and say, “Yes, Maria?” Her comment is always something like, “I don’t know what you mean. I’m lost.”
Now, how long do you think a kid could do that in most American churches before she’d be told, “Maria, this is not appropriate. We don’t care about your question. What we care about is getting out of here by noon. Besides that, you’re encouraging other people to ask questions during the sermon. The place will turn into chaos within seconds.”
However, is that so radical? One little kid wants to ask a question, and the whole system is thrown into chaos? Think of what would happen if we really believed and followed God’s wild, chaotic voice and did what He said. I mean, the place would be a shambles!
Henri Nouwen passed away, and it was a sad loss. I was so in awe of this holy, God-fearing man who knew Jesus so intimately. During a weeklong spiritual retreat, I realized he had periodic bouts of anxiety. I often found myself thinking, “Wait a minute, Henri! You’re supposed to be a man of God! You’re supposed to be quietly taking it all in and be totally unrattled by anything.” No. He was a very spiritual man who also happened to have moments of high anxiety.
I believe we sometimes think, “If I get close to God, I won’t be compulsive anymore. He’ll radically alter my personality.” No way! My personality will become a place where I meet God—part of getting in tune with my spirituality and my intimacy with God is becoming intimate with me. God is willing to be close to me here, in this body, with the flaws. Yet we’re all expecting Him to radically alter our personalities, and He’s not going to do it.
YWJ: We still say to teens, “God accepts you as you are,” but we don’t believe that anymore than the kids do!
Manning: Right. I find it kind of a delicious irony when we celebrate the great heroes of our faith: Abraham, who, to save himself, passed his wife off as his sister; David, a murderer and adulterer; Peter, three times denying Jesus; Paul, slaughtering Christians. We see flawed human beings, and we applaud God’s free use of these fragile vessels; but when it comes to ourselves, we say, “I’m a sewer. I’m a great big cesspool. I’m of no use to God.” I think the greatest sickness in the North American church is our refusal to accept our brokenness.
Yaconelli: Let’s just put all the cards on the table: God meets us in our sin. Still, deep down, we believe sinning means getting away with stuff, having our cake and eating it, too. Sinning is just another road to God—eventually it drives us to our emptiness, our flawed-ness. There, even in sin, we reach a point where we know we can’t do this anymore. All I know is that God is bigger than we think.
Manning: The greatest regrets in my life are the hours, the days, the weeks wasted in self-hatred and self-condemnation. In those moments my attention is completely on myself; biblically, that’s idolatry. We shouldn’t waste time in self-recrimination. We must instead offer that broken moment to God and move on in the power of the Spirit.
The person with low self-esteem is in the same position as the arrogant person with an exalted opinion of himself or herself. Both are focused on self. When I stumble and fall—which is not an infrequent occurrence—it’s no time for breast-beating. My response should be to say, “I blew it,” return to the awareness of the presence of God, and move along. Change doesn’t come through self-condemnation; change happens when I accept myself as broken.
Yaconelli: Eugene Peterson says we’re all in the business of impersonating ourselves. How true! I continually impersonate myself because I don’t want to be myself—because if you really knew me, there’s no way you’d love me! The closer we get to God, the more God says, “Knock off the BS and just be your genuine, real self.” I’m not so sure the church or any of us is ready for a group of people who want to be real.
Manning: My spiritual director, Larry Hein, wrote me a very moving blessing: “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 with the Father, the Son and the Spirit.”
After Larry retired, I got a new spiritual director—a nun, Noel Toomey. This woman read my soul in about 20 minutes in a way nobody else ever has. She listened as I told her about my ministry, all the traveling I do, the books I write, and then she asked, “Brennan, why are you telling me about what you do as if that’s your identify?”
I didn’t answer, and then she asked, “Brennan, have you ever heard of Miguel Pro?” I said no. She said, “Manuel Pro taught at a Catholic seminary in Brazil in 1927. Out in front of the seminary was a huge statue of John the Baptist, his finger pointing toward Christ. Manuel Pro turned to a colleague and said, ‘I am terrified I am going to become like that statue—pointing others to Christ and not moving myself.”
Yaconelli: God is not the means to an end; He is the end. He’s it. When we see care of the soul as a means to something else, we’re in trouble. “Do we long for God?” should be the bottom line. That’s it. The rest of the stuff will take care of itself if we listen to the deep longing that we all have for God.
YWJ: What does it take to get to that point? How do we start caring for our souls?
Manning: When our bodies are sick, we go to doctors—and they’re seen as indispensable. Why don’t we have spiritual mentors, too—directors of our souls to meet with once a month—to keep us accountable in our prayer lives and help us when we’re struggling with caring for our souls?
I think we’re coming to the end of an era in the American church—the era of therapeutic use of religion, which began in the ’60s: I’m going to find peace and equilibrium. I’m going to be happy all the time. As Mike was saying, Jesus merely becomes the means to an end, but I think we’re moving into an era of ruthless trust—absolutely ruthless trust in God—where no signs or maps are given.
Rahner says the only Christians who will survive in the 21st century will be the mystics. According to him, if Christianity isn’t just an intellectual abstraction for you, and you’ve had a personal encounter with Jesus, you are a mystic. You are among the only people who are going to survive.
Yaconelli: One barrier to caring for our souls is that we often ignore the very signs that we’re alive. I mean, the fact that people will read this article tells me they care about their souls. Of course, many of them will say, “Gee, I’m not very spiritual. I must be doing something wrong because I don’t have what these people have.”
Wait a minute! That’s the longing soul saying, “I want it. I want something deeper than I’ve got.” Man, that’s the first step! That’s good news!
On the other hand, these same people also may become frustrated because they’re not there yet. That also fosters the illusion that there’s a place where Henri Nouwen or Mother Teresa can stop and finally say, “I made it! Now I have an intimate relationship with Christ. Now I’m an expert!” The reality is that the closer you get to that place, the bigger the mystery; the more distant you feel, the more you recognize your flaws and your brokenness. The journey never ends.
Manning: The closer you come to the light, the more you see the darkness in yourself.
Yaconelli: I think you only need a glimpse of God. I don’t think we can handle any more than that. Every once in a while, you catch a glimpse—the back side of God—and that’s enough. You suddenly say, “This is truth. This is what it’s all about.”
Manning: Maybe the real difference between me and the giants of the Christian tradition—Wesley, Luther, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius, Teresa of Avila—is this: When I was 22 years old, I had the same shattering, life-changing encounter with Jesus that they had; but 30 years later, they were still living off that experience. They never forgot to remember. Biblically, to remember is to make present. If I can feed off those encounters with Jesus—those three or four landmark moments in my life—40 years after they’ve happened, then I think I’m going in the right direction. Jesus said, “Do this in memory of Me. If you remember, I’ll become present to you.”
Yaconelli: I think the fragrance of today’s church should be gratitude. Every day we wake up, we should be blown away. Robert Capon said, “The issue in the church is not between morality and immorality, or between what’s right and wrong. The issue in the church is between astonishment and dullness.”
When we lose our astonishment, that’s when we need to quit. What keeps us going every day is being able to say, “I can’t believe this! I just can’t believe this!”
Manning: That’s the real meaning of fear of the Lord in the Bible. Fear means affectionate awe and wonder at greatness and a sense of astonishment. If I asked 10 people, “Do you trust God?” and they all said yes—but the truth was that nine were lying—do you know how I’d learn the identity of the one who really trusts God? I’d videotape all 10 of them for a month, and the one who lived with an abiding sense of gratitude would be the one who trusted God. Gratitude always implies the perception, evaluation and acceptance of life as a gift.
YWJ: Yet we still have a need to perform. It’s not as if the Bible doesn’t address working and effort. In fact, God will say to some, “Well done, My good and faithful servant.” OK, what are we to do well? What is God looking for?
Yaconelli: I think it requires a new way of thinking. Maybe I’m just supposed to get in touch with God’s dream for me.
YWJ: Did both of you hold a more tyrannical view of God at one time?
Manning: Oh yeah, I mean it’s very true in my life. From my pastors, from my parents, from teachers. God always was watching with a critical eye, and I’d better shape up.
Yaconelli: Absolutely.
YWJ: What happened to change that?
Manning: It was that day back in 1965 when I went to a chapel in this monastery and didn’t have a clue who God was. I was in the middle of a Stations of the Cross devotion. Around the walls of the sanctuary are 14 pictures of Christ in various stages of His suffering. I was holding a little book that gives you a prayer to say at each station. At the 12th station, the book instructed me to kneel. When I kenlt down, I heard the bells in the Carmelite monastery ringing in the distance. It was exactly noon.
Three hours later, I got off the floor and realized the adventure had just begun. I saw myself as a little boy at the seashore with the waves hitting my knees, then my waist, then a tremendous wave of concussive force sweeping me off the beach. I’m arching through mid-air, being carried to a place I’ve never been before—the power of Jesus. It was an awesome moment. First calm and peace, then terror when I looked up at the station and it said Jesus died on the cross for me. I’d heard that before from the priests, the nuns, the teachers—but suddenly I was aware that it is all about loving me. All He wants is the response of my own heart.
Suddenly Jesus was a lamp unto my feet. I’d never read the Bible before, and I just had this hunger. I ransacked the monastery for a Bible, and I couldn’t find one. Finally, I found a little pocket New Testament in the basement. I opened it up at random, and the first words my eyes fell upon were
I’ve struggled all my life with envy. It’s my tragic flaw—I have to be better than everybody else. I constantly go back to that verse, to be totally happy just being who I am, envying nobody else or their gifts, only receiving the gift that is given from above and nothing more. I mean, I’ve wandered away from that countless times, but I know where to go back to.
Yaconelli: My view of God changed four years ago when I met this little girl named Tracy. She had cerebral palsy, and she was absolutely helpless. I was invited to communion with her and other handicapped people. It was Tracy’s first communion—and in the Catholic Church that’s very important. There were people there with Down’s syndrome, kids were screaming every couple of minutes—it was noisy and chaotic. Two mentally handicapped men were handling communion, and it was almost laughable. They were thrusting the communion wine in people’s faces—and if you didn’t get it, you missed! I wanted this to be a great spiritual moment, and it seemed far from it. The whole scene was absolutely distracting—until they got to Tracy.
They were about to give her the body and the blood of Christ, and I swear to you, that room suddenly became like a manger. The noise became this beautiful mix of the sheep and the cows as the baby Jesus rested in a straw crib. As the wafer was placed on Tracy’s tongue, I realized what Tracy was teaching me: She was totally helpless, yet she had the grace of God. If God loves and can be intimate with Tracy—and if God can speak to me through someone as helpless as her—why can’t God be intimate with me?
