Brennan

David Leo Schultz and JB Waggoner will be releasing the movie Brennan in a few months.  The movie is about a moment in time where Brennan Manning becomes an unlikely companion to another failing pilgrim and speaks grace and hope into the ragamuffin's life.

Brennan himself might be viewed as an unlikely candidate to minister to anyone; he was an alcoholic Catholic priest who renounced his vows, got married, then divorced, and then repeated the alcoholism cycle until he ultimately died from it.  Yet he became the evangelist of God's fatherly love in the late 20th and early 21st century.  As I understand it, he was never tossed out of the Catholic church, and he was embraced by the part of the evangelical Protestant community that had grown weary of legalism and needed a drink or breath of fresh air.

I don't think Brennan was a great writer.  It was the subject matter itself that grabbed you if you'd let it.  The topics of his books were amazingly repetitive -- God, your awesome and caring heavenly daddy, loves you as you are and not as you should be . . . because none of us are as we should be.  And nothing can ever separate you from this love.

His writing style was simple and straightforward and sometimes easy to read over without full affect.  But when you hear him speak on recorded media or watch him on YouTube, you can be overwhelmed (in an amazingly good way) by his message of God's love and grace.  If you're a sentimental old fool like me now, it can even move you to tears, as you get to know anew that you may be hearing the Good News this way for the first time in your life, even if you just watched him on YouTube last week, too.  Somehow, this message of God's love, delivered with Brennan's passion about it, was incredibly piercing to a lot of people.  Including me.

Schultz and Waggoner's Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of Brennan was a few days away from failure when they pulled the plug on it.  But somehow, a donor here and a donor there felt compelled somehow to track these guys down and say "Do it."  I was one of those few.  I didn't know these guys at all, but I had appreciated their production of Ragamuffin about Rich Mullins; and -- I really can't explain why or how -- I felt compelled to find them and support the effort. 

With a few donors plus the Kickstarter group that migrated over to gofundme (another, slightly different, crowdsourcing platform), these guys somehow scrambled together enough money to shoot this new film. 

There are a lot of reasons why I supported the movie -- go see, for instance, the youtube video of Brennan's talk on "God loves you as you are, not as you should be."  But today, these guys posted one of Brennan's quotes on Facebook.  It's not my favorite quote of his (there are plenty of other good ones), but it's one I hadn't remembered, so I'm putting it here so I can remember it in the future:

I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in right relationship with my heavenly Father nor a sappy spirituality that portrays God as such a benign teddy bear that there is no aberrant behavior or desire of mine that he will not condone.  

I want a relationship with the Abba of Jesus, who is infinitely compassionate with my brokenness and, at the same time, an awesome, incomprehensible, and unwieldy Mystery.