I am currently rereading The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning...a book that I hold very dear to my heart. This man speaks my language. Here are a couple of thoughts from what I read this morning from the first chapter:

"Our eyes are not on God...We believe that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps--indeed, we can do it ourselves. Sooner or later we are confronted with the painful truth of our inadequacy and insuffiency. Our security is shattered and our bootstraps are cut. Once the fervor has passed, weakness and infidelity appear. We discover our inability to add even a single inch to our spiritual stature. There begins a long winter of discontent that eventually flowers into gloom, pesisimism, and a subtle despair: subtle because it goes unrecognized, unnoticed, and therefore unchallenged. It take the form of boredom, drudgery. We are overcome with the ordianariness of life, by daily duties done over and over again...Life takes on a joyless, empty quality. We resemble the leading character in Eugene O'Neill's play "The Great God Brown": "Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?"

"When I get honest, I admit 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 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.""