This book is pop feel-good schlock, I had thought for a while. And I am way too indie to read a book so many people have enjoyed. To be fair, the masses and best seller lists are often wrong; it’s pretty hit and miss. But then a friend of mine recommended it to me. Strongly recommended it. Wow, I thought. This dude has some schlocky taste in books. But, come to find out, he doesn’t; he has excellent taste, and all the stories he’s told me about have been fantastic. His track record is, in a word, pretty decent. So I poked my big toe into Blue Like Jazz. Cautiously, with a surfeit of arrogance.
The trouble with Donald Miller, I thought to myself after seeing the cover, which is a perplexing shade of purple, and bears the subtitle, “Religious thoughts on Christian spirituality,” is that he doesn’t love doctrine. (By which I meant “intellectualism.”) That’s why he wrote a best selling book on Christian spirituality. Because people who love doctrine write books on Jesus, not simpering, mealy-mouthed, dish water “spirituality.”
Turns out I should read what people say before judging their books. It also turns out that the book is mostly about Jesus anyway.
His style is easy to absorb. He’s simple and self-effacing without being pathetic; he’s scathingly honest, humble and, above all else, excited. The man’s zeal is infectious, and after reading it, I’m inspired to love my neighbors better and more honestly.
I grew up in a church who loved doctrine. Our senior pastor is a powerhouse of teaching, a towering intellect, and a loving, humble man who leads our church well, together with our other two pastors, who are baying at his heels, and who also excel in those and other areas. Blue Like Jazz hasn’t made me love doctrine less, but it has made me want to love people more, and manifest that love in practical, specific ways. The point of doctrine is to change behavior and recast hearts anyway, so claiming some separation between the loves of the mind and heart is a false dichotomy. The main point I took from the book is: self-absorption is stupid, and will kill you. Humbling yourself will, by the grace of God, give you life and freedom. Love one another; bear each others’ burdens.
Toward the end of the book, Miller talks about a lecture he heard on the nature of metaphor. In the lecture, they talked about love, and how most people tend of think of love in economic terms. He gave examples: we value relationships, we invest in people, relationships can be bankrupt. I do this. I think this way. But how much better is it to think of love as a magnet, from which I exert influence and draw people to God, through myself, instead of as a transaction? A magnet draws things to itself because it’s a magnet, not because it’s trying to beef up its portfolio. Miller makes me want to emulate his passion for caring about the people around me, to be continually renewed and reminded of God’s truth, to be filled with pretense-free joy, authenticity, and genuine love.
I do think he needs revision on relatively minor subjects (the chapter on loving yourself is misguided, I think) and I haven’t read anything else by him, but Miller’s openhearted optimism and faith is encouraging. The object of reading a book like this is to pick the meat from the bones. Find what you can agree on and capitalize on that. (Perhaps this precept will work on human relationships as well? Requires further review.) He isn’t trying to be John Owen, and shouldn’t be read as such.
Hugs and warbling unity aside, I still don’t like the word “spirituality.” Everyone is spiritual by nature. You’re a spirit, your mom is a spirit, everybody you know is a spirit driving a fleshy case around with lots of steam whistles and levers on the inside. It’s more complex than mere possession, though. “Knowledge is there, in the meat,” as Neil Gaiman said in a short story about words and power; like him, “I am resolved to learn from it.” We’re some conglomerate hash of spirit and body, but the word “spirituality” suggests to me a sort of nebulous, self-informed placation of the conscience, and so I’m not such a fan.
Along similar lines, I would have liked more scripture in Blue Like Jazz, not only because the Bible talks about this stuff better than most people have, but also because you can’t know God without hearing and believing what he’s said. These are not solutions you can deduce yourself. Miller alludes to the Bible, and speaks briefly about his love for it, but Blue Like Jazz is proclaimed as a collection of “nonreligious thoughts,” so it makes sense not to include explicitly “religious” texts. Still, the Bible is inherently trustworthy; it’s nice to make use of that attribute, if you have it available.
I’d recommend Blue Like Jazz in conjunction with other sources. It’s a good book to read with people, and then discuss. Nobody can apply a book like this alone. But even alone, a reader could enjoy passages like the following, which revel in the natural glory of creation:
After I became a Christian, every aspect of human interaction had a fascinating appeal, and the intricate complexity of the natural landscape was remarkable in its perfection: the colors in the sky melding with the horizon, those south Texas sunsets burning distant clouds like flares, like fireworks, like angel wings starting flight.
That’s the truth inherent in realizing God’s worth and intimate personhood. I love to examine moments of beauty with their source in view. I know all these things—the inscrutable web of human relationships, the way the moon glows behind a cloud, the burgeoning silence before dawn, a momentary kindness between strangers, the tart sweetness of raspberries—each are from God, who orchestrates them for our joy. Something in me joins with Miller to declare that life can be real, and beautiful, and lush to that higher standard. We don’t have to settle; some things are worth pursuing, and the greatest of these is love.
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