Blue Like Jazz

Search for best price for Blue Like Jazz--Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality --Don Miller

I wasn't looking for a book to read. Books take time to read, ya know? This one snuck up on me and grabbed me. In the last three days alone, I've read good portions to several different people, just to give them a taste of what's in this book. And several asked me to read another chapter.

Over a month ago, I was visiting my sister Jan in Oregon. She mentioned how much her 20-something sons were enjoying this unusually-named book. I admire them; I was curious to know what caught their interest.

I scanned the table of contents to get a sense of the nature and style of the book. "Faith: Penguin Sex," "Church: How I go without getting angry," "Alone: 53 Years in Space." I saw "Love: How to Really Love Other People" and started into it.

When my friend Paul and I lived in the woods, we lived with hippies. Well, sort of hippies. They certainly smoked a lot of pot. They drank a lot of beer. And man did they love each other, sometimes too much, perhaps, too physically, you know, but nonetheless they loved; they accepted and cherished everybody, even the ones who judged them because they were hippies. It was odd living with the hippies at first, but I enjoyed it after a while.

They were not "live off the land and other people" hippies They were formally educated, most of them from NYU, getting their masters in literature, headed off to law school, that sort of thing. We would sit around and talk about literature and each other, and I couldn't tell the difference between the books they were talking about and their lives, they were just that cool. I liked them very much because they were interested in me. When I was with the hippies, I did not feel judged. I felt loved. To them I was an endless well of stories and perspectives and grand literary views. It felt so wonderful to be in their presence, like I was special.

I have never experienced a group of people who loved each other more than my hippies in the woods. I pull them out of my memory when I need to be reminded about goodness, about purity and kindness...

So much of what I know about getting along with people I learned from the hippies. They were magical in community. People were drawn to them. They asked me what I loved, what I hated, how I felt about this and that, what sort of music made me angry or sad. They loved me like a good novel, like an art film, and this is how I felt when I was with them. I was never conscious what my hands were doing or whether or not I sounded immature when I talked. I had always been so conscious of those things, but living with the hippies I forgot about myself. And when I lost this self-consciousness, I gained so much more. I gained an interest in people outside my own skin...

Because I grew up in the safe cocoon of big-Christianity, I came to believe that anything outside the church was filled with darkness and unlove. I remember, one Sunday evening, sitting in the pew as a child listening to the pastor read from articles in the newspaper. He took an entire hour to flip through the paper reading about all the gory murders and rapes and burglaries, and after each article, he would sigh and say, Friends, it is a bad, bad world out there. And things are only getting worse. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined there were, outside the church, people so purely lovely as the ones I met in the woods. And yet my hippie friends were not at all close to believing that Christ was the Son of God.

I was amazed to find, outside the church, genuine affection being shared, affection that seemed, well, authentic in comparison to the sort of love I had known within the church. I was even more amazed when I realized I preferred, in fact, the company of the hippies to the company of Christians. It isn't that I didn't love my Christian friends or that they didn't love me, it was just that there was something different about my hippie friends; something, I don't know, more real, more true. I could be myself around them, and I could not be myself with my Christian friends. My Christian communities had always had little unwritten social ethics like don't cuss and don't support Democrats and don't ask tough questions about the Bible... I was tired of biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them. I was tired of Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand separating the good army from the bad one. The truth is I had met the enemy in the woods and discovered they were not the enemy...

With all of Christian talk about pure love, in the end it shook down to conditional love. Again, this is a provocative statement, but I want to walk you through the emotional process I went through.

How do I find a place to stop? Each chapter is rich with his self-disclosure, his sharing of his journey in learning about God, about belief, about social justice, about change. He readily talks about things that many of us have probably thought about yet wouldn't readily admit to others. He talks about reality in a way that many churches do not--and probably should. He shares from his own experience in a way that let's the reader know he's not better than us. In so doing, he creates a safe place; I am drawn in to be with him without my being pushed or coerced, and at the same time, core truth is finding its way in through the cracks in the hard places of my heart. And that's rich.

I'm wrestling to find an analogy. There are really big churches with lots of lively music, fancy preaching, people dressed all nice. Many people don't want to even go in the front door, despite their interest in pursuing truth. I'd say that this author is one of those people who quickly becomes a friend and says let's go hang out at Starbucks and talk. Life-stuff will no doubt come up because it's all safe. And real truths, ones which might be hard to identify or isolate in the distractions of the big church, will come out in ways that are relevant, pertinent, honest, loving and funny. That's the main point I wanted to make in this post, that this book is easy and fun reading--and gets profound concepts into even my head with what feels like little effort.

Okay, with my main point out of the way, I'll share more of the same chapter. The author talked about more things he encountered and wrestled with in the next few years. Soon, he shifted.

It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things. My realization came while attending an alumni social.

There, a professor spoke about metaphors. The audience came to understand how we oft use "battle" metaphors when referring to cancer (fight, rebuild, etc.). We use "economic" metaphors when describing relationships (value, invest, bankrupt, priceless, etc.)

And that's when it hit me... The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money... This was the thing that smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did... But it is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose. When the church does not love its enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more.

There was this guy in my life at the time, a guy I went to church with whom I honestly didn't like. I thought he was sarcastic and lazy and manipulative, and he ate with his mouth open so that food almost fell from his chin when he talked. He began and ended every sentence with the word dude...

He began to get under my skin. I wanted him to change. I wanted him to read a book, memorize a poem, or explore morality, at least as an intellectual concept. I didn't know how to communicate to him that he needed to change, so I displayed it on my face. I rolled my eyes. I gave him dirty looks. I thought somehow he would sense my disapproval and change his life in order to gain my favor. In short, I withheld love.

After the lecture on metaphors, I knew what I was doing was wrong. It was selfish, and what's more, it would never work. By withholding love from my friend, he became defensive, he didn't like me, he thought I was judgmental, snobbish, proud, and mean. Rather than being drawn to me, wanting to change, he was repulsed. I was guilty of using love like money, withholding it to get somebody to be who I wanted them to be.

He then talked about what he did to change his thinking, his heart, his actions. And after that, he talked about what happened.

Things were different, but the difference wasn't with my friend, the difference was with me. I was happy... I discovered he was very funny. I mean, really hilarious. I kept telling him how funny he was. And he was smart. Quite brilliant, really. I couldn't believe that I had never seen it before. I felt as though I had lost an enemy and gained a brother. And then he began to change. It didn't matter to me whether he did or not, but he did. He began to get a little more serious about God. He was a great human being getting even better.

And the insights continued in that chapter.

I was hooked, reading that "first" chapter at Jan's, chapter 18. Soon I finished chapter 19. A few weeks later, my own copy arrived in the mail from Jan. (Thanks, Jan :) )

And so it goes with each chapter. How the literature concepts of setting, conflict, climax and resolution opened his eyes to how Christian spirituality met the requirements of the heart and matched the facts of reality. How a documentary on penguins helped him grasp the faith in Jesus he was experiencing. How his internal reaction to a poor woman in line at the grocery store set in motion the breaking down of that which blocked him from accepting God's grace.

I'm only halfway through the book. I continue to be challenged to consider who I am, face who I am--and get a better grasp on key spiritual truths. I'm looking forward to the rest.