The Tenderness of Abba

I felt compelled to share an extended excerpt from the book that I am reading by Brennan Manning called The Wisdom of Tenderness. I hope that you are blessed by it.
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An effect of understanding God as the heart of tenderness is reconciliation. Seen from a biblical perspective, reconciliation isn't primarily making up with another person; its making peace within ourselves in that dimension of our lives where we've previously been unable to find peace.

    Late on night, when I was directing a spiritual retreat, a seventy-eight-year-old nun knocked on my door. I invited her in and asked, "How may I help you?"
    She began to cry. A small, frail woman, she shook with the sobbing. When the tears subsided, she said, "I've never told anyone this. It started when I was five-years-old. My father would crawl into my bed with no clothes on. He touched me here and told me to touch him there. [Her pointing fingers left no ambiguity.] He said that our family doctor had suggested touching, so we could know one another better. When I was nine, my father took my virginity, and by the time I was twelve I knew about every kind of sexual perversion that you could find in a dirty book.
    "I can't find words to tell you how filthy I feel. I've lived with so much hatred of my father and hatred of myself that I only go to the communion table when my absence there would be conspicuous."
    I prayed with her for several minutes for inner healing. Then I asked her, "Sister, would you be willing to go off to a quiet place every morning for the next month, sit down in a chair, close your eyes, upturn your palms, and pray this one phrase over and over: 'Abba, I belong to you'?"
    She looked skeptical, so I explained further. "It's a prayer of exactly seven syllables, and seven syllables correspond perfectly to the rhythm of our breathing. Inhale on Abba; exhale on I belong to you.
    "At the outset, you'll say it with your lips alone, but as your mind becomes conscious of the meaning, you'll begin to push your head down into your heart in a figurative sense, so that 'Abba, I belong to you' becomes what the French call un cri de coeur, a heartfelt cry from the depth of your being, establishing who you are, why you're here, and where you're going.
    It's a prayer you can pray while working in the garden, listening to music, driving a car, crossing the street, watching television, reading a book, baking a cake, lying in bed. When you pray it dozens and dozens of times each day, and it becomes syncopated with the rhythm of your heartbeat, you can, as Jesus says in Luke 18, pray all day long and never lose heart."
    I asked the nun, "Will you try it?"
    She replied, "Yes."
    Two weeks later, I received the most moving and poetic letter that's ever been written to me. This old woman described the inner healing of her heart, the complete forgiveness of her father, and an inner peace she had never known before. She ended her letter this way: "A year ago I would have signed this letter with my real name in this religious life, Sister Mary Genevieve, but from now on, I'm just Daddy's little girl."
    The gentle growing into oneness, the reconciliation with that painful dimension of her past where she couldn't find peace, came about because of the gentle caressing of her memory and the massaging of her heart by the Spirit of Abba poured out from the heart of Jesus Christ. As her example shows us, accepted tenderness prevents us from being tyrants to ourselves, wreaking vengeance on ourselves, enslaving ourselves within the barriers of our fears. Those Christians who have interiorized the tenderness of God become less defensive, more simple and direct, more able to commit themselves, more aware but less afraid of the forces within and around them that drive home their littleness and insignificance.

"...I don't have to worry anymore about the means of my spiritual growth. All I've to do is expose my frailty, my poverty, and my nothingness to the furious love of God. Tenderness is the impeccable sense of feeling safe; it comes from knowing that I'm totally liked and thoroughly loved by Abba."