Brennan Manning possesses a remarkable ability to communicate the beauty of God’s love to contemporary believers and seekers. His book, The Wisdom of Tenderness: What Happens When God's Fierce Mercy Transforms Our Lives, is no exception. In this book, Manning argues that compassion is at the heart of God’s character, and this compassion is expressed is divine tenderness. Throughout the book, he invites us to not only believe this, but also to enter into the experience of God’s compassion in our lives. He writes, “If I’m graced to understand with my head and to accept with my heart that the essence of the divine nature is compassion, then God is best defined by the heart of tenderness” (23).

God’s Tenderness

We know God is compassionate because of God’s self-revelation to Moses in the Hebrew scriptures. When God reveals his glory to the great law-giver, God says, “I am the Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6).

This was Jesus’ experience of God, as expressed in his favorite word for God: Abba. “Yet there came a point in the evolution of Jesus’ religious development when he could no longer call upon God by the traditional Hebrew invocations—Adonai, Elohim, El Shaddai, Yahweh—but had to call him Abba, the very name implying tenderness” (28). Manning invites us to enter into Jesus’ experience of God by learning to approach God in the same fashion: “To address God as Abba is the boldest and simplest expression of that absolute trust with which we rely on God for all good, with which we entrust ourselves to him” (29).

This view of God not only informed and shaped Jesus’ experience, but it also guided his expression of the divine love to others:

The absolutely unpardonable thing was not [Jesus’] concern for the sick, the cripples, the lepers, the possessed . . . not even his partisanship for the poor, humble people. The real trouble was that he got involved with moral failures, with obviously irreligious and immoral people: people morally and politically suspect, so many dubious, obscure, abandoned, hopeless types, on the fringe of every society. This was the real scandal. Did he really have to go so far? This attitude in practice is notably different from the general behavior of religious people. (60)

Jesus invites us into his experience of divine compassion by his tender call to find rest in him:

When Jesus says, “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me, get away with me and you’ll recover your life” (Matt. 11:28, The Message), the poignant image of his outstretched arms conveys longing, intense desire, and a profound understanding of the human condition. Jesus knows that we will experience fatigue along the Way and get bollixed, beat up, and burned out by church. Relationships, parenting, ministry, career, appetites, addictions, and our recurring neuroses. (7)

Living Tenderness

Tenderness is vital to our understanding of God because we become like that which we adore. Therefore, tenderness – not efficiency, pragmatism, or self-actualization – must define our relationships with one another.

Tenderness doesn’t make us more productive; it isn’t task-oriented, managerial, or manipulative; it doesn’t make us more efficient and doesn’t function as a self-help tool to enhance success in the social and financial spheres. The way of tenderness affects our manner of being in the world rather than our manner of doing in the world. It leads to a gentle presence to ourselves, to others, and to God. (6)

Through tenderness, we are enabled to see “[t]he butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation, God in the human and the human in God, and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears” (31-32).

Practicing tenderness keeps us from embodying and expressing its opposite: callousness. Callousness, expressed in rash judgment toward others “is the enemy of tenderness and compassion; it was vehemently denounced by the Lord Jesus as inimical to the Kingdom lifestyle” (71). Through tenderness, we are able to accept rather than condemn failure in others: “Isn’t failure worthwhile if it teaches us to be gentle with the failure of others, to be patient, to live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness, and to pass that tenderness on to others?” (132)

Armed with a heart of tenderness, our every encounter with others becomes a visible sacrament of Jesus’ love for human beings:

Because of the mysterious substitution of Christ for the Christian, each encounter with a brother or sister is a real encounter with the risen Lord, an opportunity to respond creatively to the gospel and mature in the wisdom of tenderness…. There’s no escaping the gospel logic that all our thoughts, words, and deeds addressed to others are in a real way addressed to Christ himself. (68)

In order to embody God’s tenderness to others, we must be committed to expressing it to all people – those we naturally love and our enemies:

Truth to tell, do I spend my days loving?

After some soul-searching and a candid session with my spiritual director, I concluded that the answer is yes. Daily I do go about loving.

However, there exists a problem of epic biblical proportions: I’ve divided the human community into certain categories. There are a few people whom I love, a number whom I like, and a multitude whom I seldom think about, move proactively toward, or manifest any concern for. (76-77)

Once again, Manning offers us an attractive and compelling vision of God and invites us to both experience and express this to others in the daily movements of our ordinary lives. What a world this would be if the church accepted his vision and consistently embodied this to others!

Quotes excerpted from The Wisdom of Tenderness: What Happens When God's Fierce Mercy Transforms Our Lives by Brennan Manning
© Richard J. Vincent, 2007