A SONG AIN’T A SONG ‘TIL YOU SING IT

 by adam harbinson

I’ve discovered how to make myself invisible, but I’ll come to that in a minute. Meanwhile let me tell you about my favourite contemporary Christian writer; Brennan Manning. By all accounts he’s an odd character, perhaps in his mid-seventies. A Franciscan priest committed to serving the poor. Among his ‘callings’ he has transported water to rural villages via donkey and buckboard; he’s been a mason's assistant under the blazing Spanish sun; a dishwasher in France and a voluntary prisoner in a Swiss jail. Many see him as a mystic, an intensely godly man although not religious, and he struggles with alcoholism. He claims to have heard the voice of God audibly on an occasion when he spent six months living in solitary contemplation in a remote cave in the Zaragoza desert. Late one night as he gazed into the inky blackness of the sky he says he heard these words; ‘For love of you I left my Father's side. I came to you who ran from me, who did not want to hear my name. For love of you I was covered with spit, punched and beaten, and fixed to a wooden cross.’

Brennan later reflected, ‘Those words are burned into my life. Once you come to know the love of Jesus Christ, nothing else in the world seems beautiful or desirable by comparison.'  

But it wasn’t until his collapse into alcoholism in the mid 1970’s that his writing began in earnest. He has since written fourteen books, among them my favourite, The Ragamuffin Gospel. Brennan has a gripping style; you either love him or you wish he wasn’t there. I was listening to him the other day as he was telling one of his stories about an old friend who was dying. At one point he grabbed Brennan by the arm and said, ‘I can’t relive my life, but you’re still a young man. Brennan, don’t waste your time doing things that don’t count.’ He opened a drawer, ‘I want to give you something,’ he said, and from the drawer he pulled out a picture with some text on it. ‘Read it for me,’ he said, and Brennan read; ‘A bell ain’t a bell ‘til you ring it. A song ain’t a song ‘til you sing it. And love ain’t love ‘til you give it away.’

The two men talked easily for a while until his friend died and Brennan tells how as he looked back over his own life most of it was a drab grey, with little peaks of brilliance poking through like church spires through a blanket of fog. ‘Those were the moments when I was giving of myself for the good of others. For the rest of the time I might as well not have been born.’

So, how do we make ourselves invisible? You sit on a wooden box at the bottom of Main Street with a handful of ‘Big Issue’ magazines on your knee. Few people will see you, those who do will side-step you, studiously avoid eye contact, and yet how we love to put on our pious Sunday best, we congratulate the pastor on another ‘life-changing’ sermon and we make our way home, oblivious to the screaming pain of hurting humanity to the safety of our respectable little bubbles.

We sanitise the words of Paul to the young church at Ephesus, ‘…live a life of love,’ but they can’t be sanitised, because love ain’t love ‘til you give it away,’ and you can’t do that at armslength.

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