If "mainstream" means the middle of the river, where most of the water flows, then author Brennan Manning has never been there.
He's always on the edge — in the eddies — gathering what the river casts aside.
He is a champion of all lost sheep, of all seeds among the tares.
He writes for those who've lost their way.
He knows who and where they are.
He's been there.
He has been them.
And in his new book, "Patched Together," Manning carries on his mission to the misfits.
The story is an allegory. It is a fanciful, fictional version of Manning's own stumbling steps toward God.
In the story, young Willie Juan is a mess, inside and out. He has been badly scarred — inside and out — and his life as a mixed race boy on the Mexican border has left him without friends. Only his kindly grandmother believes in him — his grandmother and a mysterious Medicine Man who comes to town pitching a healing potion. Nobody wants to try it — even when he gives it away. But Willie Juan sees something in the man's eyes that seems sincere, and he decides to give the magic mixture a go.
You can probably guess who the Medicine Man is supposed to represent.
Just as you can guess what happens eventually to Willie Juan.
But the book is filled with enough touching insights to keep readers reading.
What I enjoyed, however, is realizing the book is another example of Manning's special interest in what he calls "ragamuffins" — people like Willie Juan who the world has cast off. Imagine the young heroes of Charles Dickens — Pip, Oliver, David Copperfield — finding religion, and you get a feeling for how Manning works.
His most popular book is "The Ragamuffin Gospel" — a devotional for all the tattered and torn, homeless and tempest tossed of society.
He also has a volume called "Reflections for Ragamuffins," a book of days with a thought for each day of the year.
Here's Manning's entry for Feb. 6: "Whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life — be it self-righteous anger, moralizing, defensiveness, the pressing need to change others ... I am alienated from my true self. My identity as Abba's child becomes ambiguous, tentative and confused."
And so goes Brennan Manning's journey down the river of life. For him, the most important things — the most interesting things — are never found in the "mainstream" of the river, but in the pools at the edges where so much gets trapped and longs to be set free.
I think he's right about that.