Paul Boccaccio

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.

Due to Soviet censorship, Mikhail Bulgakov never saw his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, published. In 1967, twenty years after he was safely dead, it was published in a trimmed version with the omitted sections published underground, through grassroots copiers (samizdat) in what sounds like an early politically motivated sneakernet.

The devil, who is called Professor Woland and claims to be a black magician, and his shape shifting minions Azazello, Behemoth the cat, Koroviev, have come to Moscow, and they’re turning the town upside down. Woland primarily works his magic on people’s greed, and then uses their pride against them. He orchestrates it beautifully. He cons people by finding what they most desire, then he tweaks it. They don’t say anything about it because they don’t want to be found out. So it works the way any good con does.

Woland can tell the future, and pretends to influence it, though we know he’s just a pawn from the novel’s epigraph:

“… who are you, then?”
“I am part of that power
which eternally wills evil
and eternally works good.”

That’s an exchange between Faust and the demon Mephistopheles, from Goethe’s Faust, and forms an apt canopy overshadowning the book. Woland is a mischief maker; almost all of what he does is uncover the sins of the people who try to cheat or resist him, usually through the agency of his three demon servants or Margarita, the woman who gives her soul to him without much deliberation. But he never does anything too bad, and if he does, it’s reversable.

The Master and Margarita trumpets the presence of the devil, but doesn’t mention God at all unless you count Yeshua, and he’s not much of a God. The supernatural lacks in substance. The devil isn’t that bad, and he deals in faerie gold and phantom pranks, which are annoying at best. Even the fellow who gets decapitated in the magic act gets his head back. And Yeshua isn’t that good—he’s diluted, and owns only some small power, most of which is compassion. Please don’t misunderstand: compassion is wonderful, and a worthy and central attribute, but when Yeshua proclaims again and again that all people are good, and persists in calling everyone a “good man,” he undermines himself,  his credibility and authority, and distances himself from any true conception of God. What does “good” mean, then? If all men are good, but they do evil things, haven’t we stripped the meaning from that word? Either he’s claiming there is no evil, only insanity, as Clarence Darrow did in his closing remarks for the Leopold and Loeb case, or he’s saying men’s righteousness is separate from his actions, which is impossible apart from grace. That’s the whole point of grace, that our actions aren’t counted to us, that Christ both takes away our sin and gives us his righteousness.

There are other people who have written at length on the subject of grace and righteousness, and Bulgakov’s novel isn’t where I’m going to go first to renew my perspective on that. (Though, if I find a nugget, I’ll take it. Content over delivery.) But I’m more interested in what he has to say about stories. The master is eaten alive by his novel; the story he writes is completely true and Margarita, his lover, is obsessed with it. She claims to also loves the man, and I think she does, but she’s stripped him of a name, and gives him a title instead, all due to this novel. To live and die on the merits of your fiction is pretty scary, but real and true and necessary nonetheless. The master despairs; he’s overcome by fear, burns the manuscript, and commits himself to an asylum.  Later, once Margarita has become a witch, she begs Woland to return the master to her on the merit of his novel. The devil fetches the master and expresses some desire to read his book, but the master answers:

‘Unfortunately, I cannot do that,’ replied the master, `because I burned it in the stove.’
‘Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,’ Woland replied, ‘that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn.’ He turned to Behemoth and said, ‘Come on. Behemoth, let’s have the novel.’

The cat produces the manuscript, which the Master burned in his stove. This sentiment is particularly interesting to me, given that Bulgakov burned the first draft of The Master and Margarita. The quote apparently took on some significance in Soviet literary culture, as a sort of mantra for the times. It speaks to me about the durability of story as well, in the sense of Jeremiah’s burning bones. Some stories don’t go away, and if you don’t tell them, somebody else will, or you’ll go crazy from holding it in.