The Prodigal: A Ragamuffin Story by Brennan Manning
So it made sense to me that in addition to telling his own story, Brennan would want to turn to fiction to help people see his life’s teachings come to life. As I knew from seeing the video trailer for his memoir, All Is Grace, which came out in 2011, Brennan was in declining health, mentally alert but in a rapidly failing body. Coauthor John Blase had helped Brennan complete All Is Grace, and he would need at least as much help this time—maybe more, since although Brennan had told stories about his life for decades, he had never written a novel.
I was honored to be chosen to write alongside Brennan. In my three previous novels, grace, love, and forgiveness are major themes. My main characters are often deeply flawed, but thanks to the power of miraculous love, they find their way back to where they ought to be. I was also excited about the idea of dramatizing the work of a great Christian teacher, because I have some experience wrestling with the artistic challenge of how to strike the balance between being a writer of fiction and a person of deep faith.
It’s one thing to say you want to write a novel about grace or forgiveness or faith, which is what Brennan wanted to do. It’s another thing to tell a powerful story in which those concepts are allowed to get up and walk around in the form of characters’ lives. Stories are about people, not about ideas; if you start with themes or ideas, the book can become nothing more than slogans, the characters just protesters carrying picket signs. To create a successful novel incorporating Brennan’s teachings on grace, compassion, and forgiveness, we had to populate a story with real people facing real problems, with the real possibility of their failure, with real desires and fears.
Brennan wanted his last book to be a powerful story that people could read, enjoy, and learn from. We wanted it to be a worthy bookend to Brennan’s faithful life and engaging words. And we quickly found the dramatic framework that would be true to all those objectives.
A few weeks after I’d been asked to work with Brennan on the project, we had agreed on a retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son. It was Brennan’s favorite story. As a recovering alcoholic, a failed husband, a priest who left the Church, it was a story that resonated with him: he had plenty of wandering on his ledger.
Like many of us, Brennan knew what it felt like to stray, to slip into mire of our own making, to wish we could go home. Like many of us, he knew what it felt like to think you are unworthy, that you have worn out your welcome, that there is no home left at home. But Jesus’ story of the son who insulted his father by demanding his inheritance while his father was still living, who shamed his father by blowing through that inheritance with wine and women until nothing was left, is a story of the purest grace and of a love that will never write us off.
For Brennan, the story of the Prodigal was the story explaining Christian faith, and it was certainly the most meaningful in regard to his own life. The idea of a loving and forgiving Father was essential to his personal faith and to his teaching. He talked often about God as “Abba,” using that loving name for “father” that Jesus uses when he talks to God. The Prodigal’s story acknowledges that we have all wasted our substance on riotous living (as the King James Version has it in Luke 15:13). We have all wandered away from God at some point, some of us farther than others. We have all thought we could never return. But one of Brennan’s favorite Bible verses describes the reunion of the Prodigal Son with his father: “So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20 NIV). Brennan often used to draw attention to the fact that this is the only time the Bible says, “God ran.” If we will just turn in the direction of God, we will find that God is already coming to meet us, has already forgiven us, has never stopped loving us.
In The Ragamuffin Gospel, just before he discussed the story of the Prodigal at length, Brennan put it this way: “The gospel of grace announces: Forgiveness precedes repentance. The sinner is accepted before he pleads for mercy. It is already granted. He need only receive it. Total amnesty. Gratuitous pardon.”2 When we imagined an earthly father, like the father in the story of The Prodigal, coming to rescue the son who has insulted and shamed him, it was a startling insight into a story—and an article of faith—I think I had taken for granted. As our protagonist says in the book, if an earthly father can love and forgive so well, can we imagine our heavenly Father is capable of less?
So: it had to be the story of the Prodigal Son. But, that settled, there are all sorts of prodigals out there. We could have written about any kind of person—whether original gangsta, suicide bomber, dishonest banker, or simply rebellious daughter—since we are all, as Brennan said, ragamuffins. That is the human condition. But Brennan wrote in The Ragamuffin Gospel that once we truly believe in God’s amazing grace, the love and forgiveness embodied in the story of the Prodigal, it allows us all to be honest about our failings. Because it opened lots of dramatic doors for us, we decided our main character should be a megachurch pastor who had fallen from grace. That would give us a logical reason to engage faith, to speak about God, and to put church front and center, and it also gave us a chance to talk about one of Brennan’s biggest problems with American religion.
Despite his great popularity and devoted following, Brennan was ever suspicious of religious celebrities. Early in The Ragamuffin Gospel, he actually called out “our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local church heroes,” and this adulation could easily become a story line.3 Our Jack Chisholm would be the sort of celebrity pastor delivering a mainstream gospel of fear and striving, a message ignoring the marvelous grace of God—but who, through his own sin and suffering, would discover how very central that grace is in understanding God, faith, and Christian practice. As you’ll see as you read the book, Jack has to learn not only how badly he was mistaken about God and God’s grace, but about the sufficiency of his own ministry, in which he was a public figure but never a pastor, in which he helped people on the other side of the world, but never those with whom he had to be in daily relationship.
Both Brennan and I had faced rock bottom. We knew what it felt like to lose everything, to have fallen into bad habits that threatened to destroy us, and Jack Chisholm would benefit from our experience—and be a better character because of it. Even if his failings made him seem a little unsympathetic at the opening of the story, we believed people would come to recognize themselves in him. We had also both been the beneficiaries of amazing grace, been forgiven not because we deserved it but purely out of love, and Jack comes to recognize the power of grace and forgiveness—and to become an authentic agent of it himself.
Jack, it turns out, was also informed by current events. Champion cyclist Lance Armstrong was suffering through his own scandal as we planned and began this book. As you probably remember, although he had for many years been accused of cheating by using performance-enhancing drugs and other illegal practices, Lance had denied it—and tried to ruin everyone who told the truth. Then in January of 2013, he did his famous interviews with Oprah Winfrey, in which he acknowledged that he had, in fact, been guilty of everything he was accused of all those years.
I watched those interviews with my girlfriend, Jeanie, and when they both were over, we turned to each other and shook our heads.
“He doesn’t seem the least bit sorry,” I said.
“He’s sorry he got caught,” she said.
Lance’s nonapology inspired our characterization of Jack Chisholm early in the novel. Like so many other celebrities, Jack follows the playbook—deny, deny, deny, then say you’re sorry that anyone was offended. But so rarely do public figures accept responsibility for their actions, truly repent of them, and offer a genuine apology to the people they hurt. In the Christian tradition, offense is supposed to be accompanied by remorse and what we call “amendment of life.” That’s what the original Greek word translated in the Bible as “repent” actually means—not just regret, but turnin
But even after we had settled on our core concepts, plot, characters, and settings, I was still thinking about an additional idea: I wanted Brennan himself to be a character in the novel. What better way to make sure that Brennan’s teachings emerged from the book than to have a character embody them? Richard Francis Xavier Manning, whom the world knew as “Brennan,” is the obvious inspiration for Francis Xavier Malone, the character in our novel known as “Father Frank.” Father Frank is the moral center of the novel. He speaks in Brennan’s cadence and sometimes in his very words, and he teaches the other characters of the book about grace, love, and compassion. I hope that Father Frank comes across as an honest and loving tribute to Brennan himself—and now that Brennan has gone to be with his Abba, that he feels like a reminder of the humor, the gentleness, the wisdom, and the faith that made Brennan a guiding light to so many.
I wish Brennan Manning had crossed my path a long, long time ago.
And I wish he were still alive to cross my path now.
But I hope that The Prodigal is a worthy monument to him, and a worthy companion to The Ragamuffin Gospel and the amazing body of books, sermons, and teaching he left behind.
Thanks for reading our story.
1. Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah, 2005), 96.
2. Ibid., 188.
3. Ibid., 25.
ZONDERVAN
The Prodigal
Copyright © 2013 by Brennan Manning and Greg Garrett
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EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780310339021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Manning, Brennan.
The prodigal : a ragamuffin story / Brennan Manning and Greg Garrett.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-310-33900-7 (trade paper : alk. paper) 1. Clergy–Fiction. I. Garrett, Greg. II. Title.
PS3563.A5365P76 2013
813’.54–dc23
2013027003
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Scripture verses taken from the King James Version of the Bible as well as the New Jerusalem Bible, Henry Wansbrough, ed. New York; London: Doubleday; Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985. And from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
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Brennan Manning, The Prodigal: A Ragamuffin Story