I am rereading Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz for the first time in nearly two years. It had an enormous impact upon me when I first read it, and I am finding that what I remembered were the parts I still like. The parts I had forgotten, however, I am having trouble with. This is not to say this isn't an important book, or that Miller's struggle with being a Christian doesn't resonate with me in myriad ways. It is to say that we have similar questions; the answers we get, however, after much searching and prayer, are quite different.
Yet, isn't that part of the beauty of what it means to be a Christian? I doubt that two people sitting down and discussing what it means to be a Christian (if such a question really is intelligible) would come to the same conclusion. Even if these two people were life-long friends who attended the same church, listened to the same sermons, and shared many of the same views on a variety of things. God's call to us is the most intimate, personal call we can have. Our on-going dialogue with God involves the most secret, most feared, most hateful parts of our lives. We comfort ourselves with cushy lies about our how closely our faith lies next to the faith of that great cloud of witnesses who has gone before us, but the facts are quite different. That great cloud of witnesses includes all sorts of people - murderers, rapists, genocidal maniacs, schizophrenics who stripped in public and ate paper claiming all the while that God was telling them to do it - we would never acknowledge as co-religionists. We coddle our pride not only with the comforting lies of our own piety, but the rewarding self-flagellation concerning our own reprobation. They are the two sides of a coin that gives pride of place to our lives and our thoughts and our faith in the strange drama of salvation. The truth is something far more dangerous to our sense of ourselves - God loves us so much, and engages us so deeply precisely to remind us that who we are doesn't matter all that much, because it's really about God. Whether we are good or bad, sin or don't, or even believe or don't - God is still there, still running the show, even if we don't always understand why some things are the way they are; even if we refuse to entertain the barest notion that there is some Thing in charge, God goes gamely on, laughing at our pretense and our guilt and our pride and our remorse, asking only that we live and love and try not to hurt each other too much in the process.
Anyway, I think Donald Miller's book is important. I look forward to discovering more things I don't like because they remind me that God speaks to Donald Miller differently that God speaks to Geoffrey Kruse-Safford, and our responses are different because we are different people. And that's OK.
Like jazz, this is far too personal to try and dissect. Sometimes, you just have to listen to the groove.
