Brennan Manning's The Furious Longing of God is all about love: God's love towards us, and the love that we are to show others. This is a remarkable little book filled with excellent one-off quotes. Below are a few of my favorite quotes, and then links to poignant quotes throughout the book.
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"[The] God I've come to know by sheer grace, the Jesus I met in the grounds of my own self, has furiously loved me regardless of my state--grace or disgrace. And why? For His love is never, never, never based on our performance, never conditioned by our moods--of elation or depression. The furious love of God knows no shadow of alteration or change. It is reliable. And always tender." [35]
"The wild, unrestricted love of God is not simply an inspiring idea. When it imposes itself on mind and heart with the stark reality of ontological truth, it determines why and at what time you get up in the morning, how you pass your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, and who you hang with; it affects what breaks your heart, what amazes you, and what makes your heart happy." [75]
"The revolutionary thinking that God loves me as I am and not as I should be requires radical rethinking and profound emotional readjustment. Small wonder that the late spiritual giant Basil Hume of London, England, claimed that Christians find it easier to believe that God exists than that God loves them... Antony Campbell remarks: Originally, I believed the acceptance of a loving God involved a sufficient but relative minor shift of attitude. After all, it was on so many people's lips. The more I worked with it, the more I realize that the acceptance in faith of God's unconditional love was not only hugely significant, it required a major change of attitude... the major shift may be the images we have of God and ourselves. How radically is our image of God reshaped if we take seriously the belief in God as deeply, passionately, and unconditionally loving us? How radically must we rework our own self-image if we accept ourselves as loveable--as deeply, passionately, and unconditionally loved by God?" [75-76]
"[If] we continue to picture God as a small-minded book-keeper, a niggling customs officer rifling through our moral suitcase, as a policeman with a club who is going to bat us over the head every time we stumble and fall, or as a whimsical, capricious, and cantankerous thief who delights in raining on our parade and stealing our joy, we flatly deny what John writes in his first letter (4:16) - 'God is love.' In human beings, love is a quality, a high-prized virtue; in God, love is His identity. [If] we continue to view ourselves as moral lepers and spiritual failures, if our lives are shadowed by low self-esteem, shame, remorse, unhealthy guilt, and self-hatred, we reject the teaching of Jesus and cling to our negative self-image." [76-77]
"I decided that if I had my life to live over again, I would not only climb more mountains, swim more rivers, and watch more sunsets; I wouldn't only jettison my hot water bottle, raincoat, umbrella, parachute, and raft; I would not only go barefoot earlier in the spring and stay out later in the fall; but I would devote not one more minute to monitoring my spiritual growth. No, not one. Gerald May is incisive and humorous: The entire process (of self-development) can be very exciting and etertaining. But the problem is there's no end to it. The fantasy is that if one heads in the right direction and just works hard enough to learn new things and grows enough and gets actualized, one will be there. None of us is quite certain exactly where there is, but it obviously has something to do with resting. In retrospect, my ponderous ponderings on the purgative, illuminative, and unitive stages of my spiritual life, my assiduous search for shortcuts to holiness, my preoccupation with my spiritual pulse and my fasts, mortifications, and penance have wrought pseudobliss and the egregious delusion that I was securely ensconced in the seventh mansion of spiritual perfection. What would I actually do if I had it to do all over again? Heeding John's counsel, I would simply do the next thing in love." [65-66]
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