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One October night in 1955, Manning dreamt he had it all, an idyll by the world's standards: a wife baking bread, a Porsche in the driveway, four children, and "a gold-trimmed plaque on the wall—the Nobel prize for literature awarded to me." But to him, it was a nightmare. He woke up in cold sweat with a shout, "O God, there has to be more!" This cry is still the prayer of Manning's life. God has answered it by taking the discontented Franciscan through a variety of experiences in which he has glimpsed Jesus.

He saw him from many angles in the late '60s when, on a two-year leave of absence from the Franciscans, the author of Abba's Child joined the Little Brothers of Jesus, an order committed to imitating the life of Christ before his public ministry. That meant days spent in manual labor among the poor and nights in prayer. Manning's assignments included transporting water to villages on a donkey and buckboard in Spain, and assisting a mason and washing dishes in France. He once voluntarily checked himself into a Swiss jail with hardened criminals. Only the guard knew his identity. "You never asked what the other prisoners were in for because they'd say, 'It's none of your business,'" Manning explains. "So when they'd ask me the same question, I'd say, 'It's none of your business.'"

He spent six months in a remote cave in the Zaragoza desert in Spain. Every Sunday someone dropped off food, water, and kerosene for the lamp in a designated burrow. Reading occupied most of his time: the Bible, the trilogy of St. John of the Cross, and the writings of Charles de Foucauld, a martyred priest who inspired the Little Brothers movement. "There are many days when you put your head in the pillow at night and the day wasn't long enough to do everything that you wanted to do," Manning says. "Other days were dry, lonely."

Why did he do it? He wanted to find the nearness of God—the kind of emotional intimacy newlyweds enjoy on their honeymoon—even in the dry and lonely days. "When you go on a honeymoon, does anybody ever ask what you did for two weeks? Do we really believe that the presence of God can become so vivid and so real that the time you're there, whether you are eating an egg or celebrating the Eucharist, the sense of his presence is constant?" It was in that cave that Manning received a revelation.

At 3 a.m. on December 13, 1968, he reports, Jesus spoke to him with these words, "For love of you I left my Father's side. I came to you who ran from me, who fled me, who did not want to hear my name. For love of you I was covered with spit, punched and beaten, and fixed to the wood of the cross." The message of God's persistent love has etched itself in Manning's heart, helping this sinner pick himself up countless times since then. Manning's gift is making people feel this love as though they were sitting on their Abba's lap, safe, in spite of their sin and shame. He puts it this way: "The work that God has given me to do is helping people to enter the existential experience of being loved in their brokenness."

The Imposter thought nothing of the cave vision, and began searching for love and acceptance in the wrong places when Manning was a minister on the campus of Broward Community College in Florida in the mid '70s. When he failed to find the affirmation he craved, he medicated himself with booze and eventually succumbed to alcoholism. After a six-month-long treatment, he became sober and began writing. He says he has had two relapses since, one in 1980 and the other in 1993.

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June 2004, Vol. 48, No. 6