Blue Like Jazz by Don Miller. Thomas Nelson, 2003.

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the soxophone. I stood there for firteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

Some books are very deep. Some books are truly profound, leaving you in your chair for a long while after finishing them, trying to work through what they mean. Blue Like Jazz isn’t one of those. But there’s another kind of “great” book. It’s the kind of book where by the end you feel like the author is a good friend, or at least you wish he were. I’d like to have coffee and smoke a pipe with Don Miller.

I’ll get the negative stuff out of the way first. The book rambles. It starts out seeming to be a story of Don’s spiritual journey, but somewhere in the middle devolves into a collection of disconnected topical essays. But there are still hints of the story along the way. Hey, this is postmodern writings, so that’s all okay, right? At times Miller seems to be trying too hard to be Douglas Coupland (on whom he admits to having an author crush), but I tend to think we could use a few good Christian Coupland’s out there. And, along with many other reviewers, I’ll agree that sometimes his answers seem surprisingly pat for someone who seems to seek so ardently (How do you find a church that won’t anger you? Just pray, and go to the one God shows you.).

Also at times, Miller seems naive, as when he gets all swoony about how “real” and “accepting” everyone is at a college he hangs out at where “free love and drugs” seem to be the primary curriculum. He seems to too easily forget his own story about encountering one of the professors of that institution who told him that he’d be happy if all Christians were dead, or the bumper sticker he saw there that expressed regret that it was no longer possible to throw Christians to the lions. He seems to have viewed his days living among hippies in the woods through the same rose colored glasses. Frankly, I get a little tired of the all-too-fashionable “worldly people are more loving than Christians” rant. It’s true and it’s not true. What is true is that Christians, as an aggregate, are no different from anyone else.

Good…I did my duty as a reviewer, now I can climb down from my tower and just tell you what I liked about this book. Like your best friend, Miller feels he can share with you the things that we wouldn’t dare say to our other Christian aquaintances, the stuff you never say in the lobby after the worship service. He gives voice to the nagging doubts and struggles we all have about our relationship with God, but rarely mention for fear of being tagged as “weak” Christians. Reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s story, Miller did everything he could to keep away from Christianity, but in the end had to surrender to the relentless pursuit of God. He found that he couldn’t not love Jesus, no matter how hard he tried. The book is partly about that pursuit and capture, but mostly about the aftermath–what is one supposed to do with this Jesus once one gives in to him?

One of the gifts of Blue Like Jazz is that Miller is able to look at his life journey with a sense of humor…and he’s often quite funny himself. Here’s his comment after confessing to years of pride over not owning a television:

A couple of years ago…I visited a chruch in the suburbs, and there was this blowhard preacher talking about how television rots your brain. He said that when we are watching television our minds are working no harder than when we are sleeping. I thought that sounded heavenly. I bought one that afternoon.

On relationships:

I sat in the Texaco parking lot and thought about poor old Romeo, begging for love, running off with his woman, and then accidentally dying. Some dates go terrible, it’s a fact.

Here’s a tip I’ve never used: I understand you can learn a great deal about girldom by reading Pride and Prejudice, and I own a copy, but I have never read it. I tried. It was given to me by a girl with a little note inside that read: What is in this book is the heart of a woman. I am sure the heart of a woman is pure and lovely, but the first chapter of said heart is hopelessly boring. Nobody dies at all. I keep the book on my shelf because girls come into my room, sit on my couch,and eye the books on the adjacent shelf. You have a copy of Pride and Prejudice, they exclamin in a gentle sigh and smile. Yes, I say. Yes, I do.

On Bible study methods:

[Quoting his friend Penny] “We would eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes and read the Bible, which is ths only way to do it, if you ask me. Don, the Bible is so good with chocolate. I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, but it isn’t. It is a chocolate thing.

One of the recurring themes in this book is that a relationship with Jesus is not math. It’s not a problem to be solved. In the chapter on worship, Miller concludes: “At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay.” Whether dealing with relationships, money, forgiveness, or whatever, he calls us to a childlike faith that never loses a sense of wonder, “that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow.” For Miller, wonder is the very definition of worship.

The largest theme of the book, however, seems to be the call to die to self. In a chapter on community, he tells about his stay at a home in San Francisco whose owner provides lodging for Christians doing ministry work in the city. Every day he cleans up after and cooks for his lodgers, most of whom don’t even thank him. Miller asks him how he can keep doing that. “Don,” he responds, “if we are not willing to wake up oin the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether of not we are really following Jesus.” Earlier in the book, Miller relates how he came to the realization that the problem behind all of his angst and failure in his Christian walk was his own selfishness:

I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality to deal with. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest.

From that point forward, the book is about Miller’s quest to face that fact head on. A pivotal scene in the book begins with a late night brainstorming session that results in Miller and his friends dressing in monk’s costumes and opening a confessional booth at the location of a Bacchanalian festival. The twist is that the “monks” confess their own sins (and those of Christendom in general) to each person who enters the booth. This act ends up not only being the start of real ministry on the campus, but the beginning of healing for Miller and his friends.

Blue Like Jazz reads more like a well-written blog than a well-written book. And just like with a blog that you read regularly, you begin to feel that in some way that you know the author, that he or she is your friend. Don Miller became a friend of mine at some point during my reading of his book. When he expresses at the end that he hopes to meet me some day, I believe him. I’d gladly join him and Tony the Beat Poet and Andrew the Protestor up on the roof of his attic apartment for a good smoke and some ruminations about loving and being loved by Jesus.

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