Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller
Thomas Nelson, 2003 Paperback
243 pages ISBN: 0785263705
In a recent Public Radio interview, Elaine Pagels (author of The Gnostic Gospels) said she grew up expecting religion to die out, that science and technology would make it irrelevant. Instead she found contemporary society more interested in spirituality than ever before. Though her observation is true, it dismisses the cultural shift that has taken place over the last 50 years. The rationality behind science and technology didn’t make religion irrelevant. But to a large extent postmodernism, with its resistance to exclusive truth and its distrust of grand narratives, has. We are left with a society that has abandoned religion in favor of spirituality.
This poses a serious challenge to Christians in the 21st century. Christianity’s offer of objective, exclusive truth stands on one side of a cultural divide. On the other side is the postmodern thinker, seeking something subjective, personal, and tolerant. Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz attempts to bridge that chasm. The disarming subtitle is Nonreligious thoughts on Christian Spirituality, and the book shows a spirituality, unquestionably Christian, that can fulfill the desires springing from a postmodern worldview: the desires for spirituality, for community, for authenticity, and for relevance.
In the Author’s Note, as part of an attempt to explain the title’s metaphor, Miller states “Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.” (p.ix) Thus the book is, in part, a spiritual autobiography, where theological grand narrative is abandoned for a personal story. But the story is not about Donald Miller. As he mentions towards the end of the book, “The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me.” (p.182) The book is really about the part we need
to play in our own story if we want to have a happy ending.
The writing is fast-paced and humorous, and rich with imagery and metaphor. Stylistically, it reminded me of Dave Egger’s Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, with the honesty of Augustine’s Confessions mixed in. As a narrative, it journeys from the confusion of youth to the peace Miller has achieved today. Along the way, it makes rest stops via flashbacks and tangential vignettes. Rarely does the book pontificate or dictate, and any such instances are accompanied by a wink and a nod. For example, in one of the few blatant bits of advice given in the book, Miller lists his step-by-step formula for how you, too, can go to church without getting angry:
- Pray that God will show you a church filled with people who share your interests and values.
- Go to the church God shows you.
- Don’t hold grudges against any other churches. God loves those churches almost as much as he loves yours. (p.138)
This does not mean the book is bereft of insight. There are plenty of painful, honest observations scattered throughout the text. Yet each of these bits of advice is surrounded by story. The story of his personal struggles, and his search for relevance and meaning in life. In one of my favorite passages, Miller recounts an experience he had watching a woman paying for groceries with food stamps. From this event springs a recognition of his own reaction to charity.
Somehow I had come to believe that because a person is in need, they are candidates for sympathy, not just charity. It was not that I wanted to buy her groceries, the government was already doing that. I wanted to buy her dignity. And yet, by judging her, I was the one taking her dignity away. . . I love to give charity, but I don’t want to be charity. This is why I have so much trouble with grace. (p.84)
He uses this to discuss his own struggle with the concept of grace, and finally concludes,
I am too prideful to accept the grace of God. It isn’t that I want to earn my own way to give something to God, it’s that I want to earn my own way so I won’t be charity. . . Who am I to think myself above God’s charity? And why would I forsake the riches of God’s righteousness for the dung of my own ego? . . . If I cannot accept God’s love, I cannot love him in return, and I cannot obey him. Self-discipline will never make us feel righteous or clean; accepting God’s love will. (pp.85-6)
Miller also is quite frank about his faith and the a-rationality of Christian spirituality.
There are many idea withing Christian spirituality that contradict the facts of reality as I understand them. A statement like this offends some Christians because they believe if aspects of their faith do not obey the facts of reality, they are not true. But I think there are all sorts of things our hearts believe that don’t make any sense to our heads. Love, for instance; we believe in love. Beauty. Jesus as God. It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. (p.201)
At another point, he observes,
Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys believe in God and they can prove he does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care. I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from Him, and please pray that I never do, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything. (p.103)
As a Christian, I found his willingness to embrace an a-rational faith refreshing. But if not for rational reasons, why do we believe in God and Jesus? The answer, he says, is because without God, the story of life doesn’t make sense. “Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is like making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon. . . Belief is something that happens to us too. Sure, there is some data involved, but mostly it is this deep, deep conviction, [this] idea that that life is about this thing, and it really isn’t an option for it to be something else.” (p.104)
Accepting this can move us from belief to worship. Miller later states, “Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to a formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.” (p.205) By accepting God as someone we can try to apprehend, but will never understand, we have a God we can worship.
His frankness regarding spiritual struggle and personal pain made me a bit more receptive to what he had to say. There were many aspects of his story I could relate to on a personal level. And once I started to relate to his story, I began to have little “aha!” moments as he worked his way through Christianity and into Christian spirituality. The difference between the two is highlighted in a passage about a radio interview Miller was giving on secular radio. Asked by the host to defend Christianity, Miller refused: though a Christian, the term “Christianity” meant so many different things to so many different people — and to those who needed to hear the gospel, “Christianity” often means something that no Christian will defend — that he, “would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me.” (p.115).
Having established that he believes, and why, Miller finishes the book with a few chapters about what we should be doing with our faith. He talks about real struggles that real Christians have in their lives, about romantic love and community, about happiness and worship. Those things come neither naturally nor easily. But they are achievable, and they are things which can fulfill our desires for spirituality, for authenticity, and for relevance.