Review of Rich Mullins "Ragamuffin" film

I attended the Nashville screening of the new Rich Mullins "Ragamuffin" film last night before a full house at Collins Auditorium at David Lipscomb Univ. 

As a friend of Rich's from '84 to '97, I was hesitant about how I would react to a film about such a complex person who wrestled mightily with fanfare and acclaim. My fears were generally allayed, and for a small budget film by a first-time producer/director, it is pretty good. Most of this is due to the performance in the lead role by Michael Koch, who compellingly captures the creative side of Rich (he is an accomplished pianist/guitarist, and nails Rich's vocal delivery and onstage patter), as well as the brooding, intense side of Mullins' personality.

Some of the drawbacks include: editing weaknesses (it is unnecessarily long at 2 hours and 20 minutes, and somewhat repetitive in several themes); an overly simplistic (and oft brutal) critique of the music biz that deserves more nuance; primitive sets (the recording and radio studios are laughable), and some key characters in Rich's life that were completely ignored. It would've also been nice to see a bit more of Rich's unbridled kindness and silly/impish/downright hilarious sides. But these flaws are not so glaring that it renders the film unwatchable.

To the contrary, the essence of Rich's struggles with an unloving father, alcohol, disappointments in relationships, and loneliness drive the narrative and keep you wondering if/how he would ever find some degree of peace and acceptance. It doesn't give a lot of neat, tidy Christian platitudes or easy resolve. How could it if it were to be honest about the living paradox that was Rich Mullins? So, I give it an A- for effort, a C- for technique, and an overall grade of B- for residual impact it will leave with the viewer. For anyone who was a fan of Rich, or wishes to see faith being wrestled-out with earnest grit, then I recommend "Ragamuffin."

My longtime friend, Bernie Sheahan, wrote this review which gives some further coloring which I agree with...

"I saw "Ragamuffin" last week here in California and was pretty nervous about how I'd react. (Forgot my Kleenex, so I stole a whole roll of toilet paper from the church bathroom!) I knew Rich very well and for a long time. (I'm one of many, and aren't we lucky? Blessed.) He was one of six people at my 25th birthday dinner, in 1982. So when I saw the trailer online, I had a bit of a freak-out. Too weird. I knew David Mullins was part of this, but still...how could they capture him, and how dare they make a movie when he would have hated the thought of it?

"At the end of the film, they had a Q&A session with the director, David Leo Schultz. I hopped right up--"pick me, pick me!" No questions. Just this: "Thank you...Rich was a dear friend of mine...I was afraid I'd yell out or throw things at the screen, but you got him. Thank you for showing the shadows." I said a lot more (you know me; I'm Irish) but in talking to Schultz later on I realized that Rich would have loved him. You will, too.

"As Kathy Sprinkle told me, it's not a biopic. This isn't a chronological, get-everything, History Of Rich Mullins. Don't be upset about not seeing "Rich" in shoes or sweaters, as in his real life, in winter or on hot pavement. Movies are about images. The white t-shirt and bare feet are symbolic, really. I'm sorry if I just just pulled a 'Film as Lit' teacher thing on you.

"The images are lovely. David Schultz did a marvelous job with a tiny budget. He goes from Indiana to Cincinnati to Nashville to Wichita to "the res" along the open roads with color and light that match Rich's musical palette and poetic vision. You'll have to ask him if those are actual locations. I can vouch for a few of them as the real thing. There's one that's surely not, and it doesn't matter, because any countryside four-lane highway will do. That scene is handled with grace and mercy: it's brief, tells little, and moves quickly from dark mystery to sunny memory and life most real.

"You Nashville folk will laugh your head off in some places. There was only so much they could do with a small budget, I guess. No matter. See it with an open heart. Put aside your feelings about the music business, either way (this is, shall we say, less than sympathetic to the "industry" point of view).

"What it does is present the essence of Rich. How he was, as in the title of his brother's book, "an arrow pointing to heaven". Rich didn't want you to "get" him. He wanted you to get God--to be gotten by Him. The director found, in the four years working on the film, that Rich Mullins has some intensely loyal fans. Yup. Some who seemed to almost worship Rich more than God. Rich, shall we say, discouraged that. "Be God's" -- that's how he signed every autograph. Be God's. So it's not that important, really, what I think about how Rich was portrayed in any film. I am a loyal friend, yes. But he never said, "Be Rich's." Even so, I, and all of us who knew him, are a little protective of his essence. As dumb as that may sound.

"The fellow who plays Rich was not an actor but a musician, and he surprised me with his skill and passion. He sounds like him, enough for me to lose myself in the story for much of its length (it's long!) He does the shadows well. And this film doesn't shirk from the dark, thank goodness. He's exuberant, he spins, he gets angry. He's not funny and playful like Rich--it's not in his repertoire, not in his personality. That's OK. He pulls it off well enough that it made me miss Rich. A lot. That's something, considering it's an actor who's singing and playing, talking, saying things like "You like it? You really like it?"

"I like it. I really like it."        -Bernie Sheahan

Listing of all the showings and where to get tix here (once you get to the page, click on the "Events " tab):

http://www.itickets.com/artists/27150/Rich%20Mullins%20Film_concert

Mother Teresa on Clarity and Trust

When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at “the house of the dying” in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life.  On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa.  She asked, “And what can I do for you?”  Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.

“What do you want me to pray for?” she asked.  He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles form the United States: “Pray that I have clarity.”

She said firmly, “No, I will not do that.” 

When he asked her why, she said,  “Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.” 

When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, “I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust.  So I will pray that you trust God.”

(from Ruthless Trust, by Brennan Manning, 2000)

My Friend Brennan

I was fortunate to have Brennan Manning a friend over the past 25 years.  With his passing a few days ago at age 78, I've been searching for the right words to help deal with this loss.  I went looking in my library for all my favorite books by him, and realized that I have loaned nearly all of them out to others, who, like me, needed to read “good news for the bedraggled, beat-up, and burnt-out;” fresh cups of grace to many who were tired of fellow Christians’ legalism and judgment. This piece written by Philip Yancey several years ago at the release of Brennan's final book, sums up well my thoughts on this humble, broken, and forgiven man who was much more interested in being a pioneer than a settler.

Brennan Manning has written a memoir titled All Is Grace that will be published this year by David C. Cook Publishing.  I wrote the Foreword, and include excerpts here about my friend.

I first met Brennan Manning at an event called Greenbelt Festival in England, a sort of Christian Woodstock of artists, musicians and speakers that had attracted twenty thousand fans to tents and impromptu venues set up in the muddy infield of a horse-racing track.  Brennan seemed dazzled by the spectacle, and like a color commentator kept trying to explain the subtleties of evangelicalism to his wife Roslyn, a cradle Catholic who lacked Brennan’s experience with the subculture.

We did not see each other often over the years, but each time our paths crossed we went deeper, rather than tilling the same ground of friendship.  When he visited a monastery in Colorado for spiritual retreats, he would sometimes get a temporary dispensation from the rule of silence and meet my wife and me at an ice cream parlor (one addiction he doesn’t disclose in these pages).  Our backgrounds could hardly have been more different— Southern fundamentalism vs. Northeastern Catholic—and yet by different routes we had both stumbled upon an Artesian well of grace and have been gulping it ever since.  One glorious fall afternoon we hiked on a carpet of golden Aspen leaves along a mountain stream and I heard the details of Brennan’s life: his loveless childhood, his marathon search for God, his marriage and divorce, his lies and coverups, his continuing struggles with alcohol addiction.

As you read this memoir you may be tempted, as I am, to think “Oh, what might have been…if Brennan hadn’t given into drink.”  I urge you to reframe the thought to, “Oh, what might have been…if Brennan hadn’t discovered grace.”  More than once I have watched this leprechaun of an Irish Catholic hold spellbound an audience of thousands by telling in a new and personal way the story that all of us want to hear: that the Maker of all things loves and forgives us.  Brennan knows well that love and especially the forgiveness.  Like “Christian,” the everyman character in The Pilgrim’s Progress, he progressed not by always making right decisions but by responding appropriately to wrong ones.  (John Bunyan, after all, titled his own spiritual biography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners).

At one point Brennan likens himself to Samson, that flawed superman whom God somehow found a way to use right up to the day of his death.  Reading such stories in the Old Testament, I’ve come up with a simple principle to explain how God can use the likes of such imperfect men and women: “God uses the talent pool available.”  Again and again, Brennan made himself available.  In the last few years, nearly blind, subject to illness and falls, at an age when he should have been enjoying retirement on a beach in Florida, he kept getting on airplanes and flying places to proclaim a Gospel he believed with all his heart but could not always live.

“All is grace,” Brennan concludes, looking back on a rich but stained life.  He has placed his trust in that foundational truth of the universe, which he has proclaimed faithfully and eloquently.

As a writer, I live in daily awareness of how much easier it is to edit a book than edit a life.  When I write about what I believe and how I should live, it sounds neat and orderly.  When I try to live it out, all hell breaks loose.  Reading Brennan’s memoir, I see something of the reverse pattern.  By focusing on the flaws, he leaves out many of the triumphs.  I keep wanting him to tell the stories that put him in a good light, and there are many.  Choosing full disclosure over a narrative that might burnish his reputation, Brennan presents himself as the Apostle Paul once did, as a “clay jar,” a disposable container made of baked dirt.  We must look to his other books for a full picture of the treasure that lay inside.

A poem by Leonard Cohen says it well:

Ring the bells that still can ring.


Forget your perfect offering.


There is a crack in everything.


That’s how the light gets in.

The Best Closing Prayer

Brennan Manning relays this…

Joseph was an old man dying of cancer in New Jersey.  This gentleman’s daughter has asked the local priest to come and pray with her father at her home where he was in hospice during what might be his last days.  When the priest arrived, he found the man lying in bed with his head propped up on two pillows and an empty chair beside his bed.  The priest assumed that the old fellow had been informed of his visit. “I guess you were expecting me,” the man of the cloth said.

“No, who are you?”

“I’m the new associate at your parish,” the priest replied.  “When I saw the empty chair, I figured you knew I was going to show up.”

“Oh, yeah, the chair,” said the bedridden man.  “Would you mind closing the door?”

Puzzled, the priest shut the door.  “I’ve never told anyone this, not even my daughter,” said the man, “but all my life I have never known how to pray.  At the Sunday Mass I used to hear the pastor talk about prayer, but it always went right over my head.  Finally, I said to him in sheer frustration, ‘I get nothing out of your homilies on prayer.’

“'Here,’ says my pastor reaching into the bottom drawer of his desk. ‘Read this book by Hans Urs von Balthasar.  He’s a Swiss theologian.  It’s the best book on contemplative prayer in the twentieth century.’

“Well, Father,” said the man, “I took the book home and tried to read it. But in the first three pages I had to look up twelve words in the dictionary.  I gave the book back to my pastor, thanked him, and under my breath whispered, ‘for nothin’.’

“I abandoned any attempt at prayer,” he continued, “until one day about four years ago my best friend said to me, ‘Joe, prayer is just a simple matter of having a conversation with Jesus.  Here’s what I suggest.  Sit down on a chair, place an empty chair in front of you, and in faith see Jesus on the chair.  It’s not spooky because he promised, ‘I’ll be with you all days.’  Then just speak to Him and listen in the same way you’re doing with me right now.’

“So, Padre, I tried it and I’ve liked it so much that I do it a couple of hours every day, even now while here at my daughter’s home.  I’m careful, though…if she saw me talking to an empty chair, she’d either have a nervous breakdown or send me off to the funny farm.”

The priest was deeply moved by the story and encouraged the old guy to continue on that journey.  Then he prayed with him, anointed him with oil, and returned to the rectory.

Two nights later the daughter called to tell the priest that her daddy had died that afternoon, finally succumbing to his painful battle.

“Did he die in peace?” he asked.

“Yes, when I left the house around two o’clock he called me over to his bedside, told me one of his corny jokes, and kissed me on the cheek.  When I got back from the store an hour later, I found him dead.” 

“But there was something strange, Father.  In fact, beyond strange, kinda weird.  Apparently just before Daddy died, he leaned over and rested his head on the chair beside the bed.”