Donald Miller’s “Blue Like Jazz” (1)

Wikipedia gives us a good start:

Blue Like Jazz is the second book by Donald Miller. This semi-autobiographical work, subtitled “Non-Religious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality,” is a collection of essays and personal reflections chronicling the author’s growing understanding of the nature of God and Jesus, and the need and responsibility for an authentic personal response to that understanding. Much of the work centers on Miller’s experiences with friends and fellow students while attending Reed College, a liberal university in Portland, Oregon.The book’s popularity is due to its personable style and seemingly relevant content which most appeals to twentysomething and thirtysomething, post-modern Christians in the emerging church movement. His writings have often been compared to fellow Christian memoirist, Anne Lamott.

His writing style is also reminiscent Madeleine L’engle, who died recently. He writes in a way that makes life sound important but weaves a lot of humor in as well. Basically, he writes autobiography and through his writing tries to map the joys and challenges of being a Christian. From these life stories you know he leads an interesting life and proves the adage that life really can be stranger than fiction sometimes.

Blue Like Jazz is not the type of book I would have found in the Christian bookstores my parents so often took me to as a child. Don would have been too “edgy” for the Christian book market of 20 years ago, a little too honest about his failings, but that is exactly the kind of stuff the Christian book market could have used 20 years ago. But then – as now – success and prosperity sell more books than failure and confession.

And I wish I’d read this book sooner because it had a profound effect on me. My used copy obviously lived its first life as a gift to a graduate, and the shallowness of the yearbook-style best wishes hand-written on the inside cover (I’ll list those later) are not indicative of the depth of the content of the book. There is much inside for those of us over 30 as well.

The subtitle reads “Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality”, which of course stirs the interest of a great number of readers I’m sure. “What kinds of thoughts, other than religious ones, can one have about Christian spirituality?” some might ask. Miller answers. This is not really a book about theology, but then again it is. The topics Miller writes about are not cloaked in academic language but he does tackle big ideas. I’ll let a few passages speak for the book.

The first notable sentence I came to was this:

“And so from the beginning, the chasm that separated me from God was as deep as wealth and as wide as fashion.” And I’ll just leave that sentence hanging there for you to read and ponder because even though it is a summary of the first page of the book I think it stands on its own as a kind of poetry. I’ll answer the question the way a poet and artist would by redirecting: well, what does it mean to you?

Don knows a lot about me. I know this because he says things like “I grew up going to church, so I got used to hearing about God. He was like Uncle Harry or Aunt Sally except we didn’t have pictures.” That was me – God was ever-present but not in the way a close friend is.

Go to Part 2 

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