Summary
First published: Nashville, Tenn.: T. Nelson, 2003
Genre(s): Nonfiction
Subgenre(s): Autobiography; handbook for living; spiritual treatise
Core issue(s): Connectedness; discipleship; forgiveness; grace; hope; love; redemption
Overview
A nationally known evangelical minister, Donald Miller has tirelessly promoted what he terms postmodern Christian spirituality specifically directed to a generation of disaffected and disinterested Christians fostered by an institutional expression of a religion that, at its beginning, was intended to be a compelling emotional experience. Miller, positioning himself as a kind of contemporary Christian Everyman, recounts his own spiritual journey in a series of essays that, although not strictly linear, track with evident care his movement toward embracing a spirituality that makes the Christian Gospel message of love and the presence of Jesus immediate and relevant.
Miller employs an archmetaphor: the rich emotional impact of jazz, which defies explanation and compels the deepest sort of intimacy. He argues that Christian redemption on earth begins not with cheerless fidelity to church attendance, rigorous scriptural study (Miller himself acknowledges he has read only parts of the Bible), or the self-loathing and guilt that attend an unexamined assumption of a punishing God who acts largely as a bookkeeper for the soul. Rather, redemption begins with the emotional conviction that each person is a sinner, that each person is part of the fallen world commandeered by Satan as recorded in Genesis, and that only by approaching God with the earnest intention to seek forgiveness for their sinful nature and for their indifferent reception of the Christian message can people finally open themselves to the intuitive conviction that Jesus is love, that Jesus intended his creatures to love themselves and each other, and that salvation is a heartfelt joy. Thus, love of Jesus is both a decision and a revelation. Miller’s argument is presented in an invitatory second person: You must apologize to God before you experience the happiness ransomed on Calvary.
The message is straightforward evangelical Christianity (Miller was raised a fundamentalist Baptist). There is only a passing acknowledgment of the triune God (his focus is principally on the redemptive love of Jesus) and of the Old Testament (his focus is principally on the evangelists and the wisdom of Jesus). The presentation, however, distinguishes Miller’s traditional argument. Forsaking the homiletic voice of the preacher and the scholarly voice of a theologian, Miller tells his own story, his own journey toward the epiphanic conviction of Jesus’ love, which begins with a childhood without a father (he suggests his lifelong pilgrimage is in part a search for a comforting Father) and finds its landmark moments when Miller ends up, after a cross-country odyssey, in Oregon within a small, resilient, and unorthodox Christian community named Imago Dei (or Image of God) that ministers around the campus of Reed College, a small liberal arts campus known nationally for its liberal thought and its irreverent promotion of nontraditional expressions of intellectual freedom.
There amid a raucous campus environment that indulges the excesses of the fleshly life (alcohol, promiscuity, drugs, atheism), Miller begins to explore his own commitment to Christianity. His anecdotal essays—each of which centers on a Christian principle (grace, love, redemption) and ordinary experiences that unexpectedly reveal critical aspects of his ongoing quest to tap the emotional center of Christianity—are rendered in an approachable, encouraging voice rather than one that insists on its lessons. Miller comes across as Don, a fallible Christian (he smokes dope, he drinks, he doubts, he watches too much television, he is socially awkward) who comes to determine that contemporary Christianity faces two problems: fallen humanity’s stubborn egotism and contemporary Christianity’s institutional expression, which encourages bigotry, political...
(This entire section contains 1468 words.)
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activism, and paranoia by targeting specific groups (often gays and liberals) for directed hate. Like Christian allegorists since John Bunyan, Miller is accompanied on his quest by stock characters—Andrew the Protester, Tony the Beat Poet, Mark the Cussing Pastor, Penny the Doubter—to illustrate the frustrations and challenges of the Christian journey.
Happiness, Miller contends, begins with accepting others unconditionally, returning to Jesus the forgiving God, and accepting the love God intends his creatures to enjoy. To accept, rather than understand, Jesus, and to believe in, rather than know, God are the foundation of what Miller sees as Christian spirituality. Miller pictures Jesus as a friend who joins us at a campfire, listens patiently, and then offers love as the sole avenue to authentic freedom. Miller argues that Christianity was never intended to encourage monastic isolation but demands the energy of witnessing and the commitment to community.
Miller’s journey toward Christian conviction—that ultimate affirmation of complete dependency on Jesus and the absolute depravity of the individual person who has been redeemed by the awful sacrifice at Calvary—is rendered contemporary and immediate by Miller’s postmodern, cool style: The writing is conversational and hip, the voice self-deprecating and ironic, the narrative multigeneric (part memoir, part sermon-essay, part parable, part Christian handbook, and even part comic book), and the argument rich with allusions to pop culture (including The Simpsons, Starbucks, South Park, Nintendo, infomercials, and rap). Regardless of such referents, Miller’s message ultimately draws its resonance from its rediscovery of the Christian message, all but lost in those contemporary churches where congregations gather without emotion and feel estranged from God. That message is: Respond to the joyful dependency that sustains human beings as creations of a God who has designed a universe to reflect his unfathomable love. Not surprisingly, Miller finds great appeal in the counterculture avant-garde leftovers of the 1960’s and the hippie lifestyle of love and acceptance. He rejects only the flower children’s misdirected exploration of controlled substances and the chic, trendy New Age spiritualism that developed out of their youthful idealism.
Christian Themes
Although Miller’s book was dismissed as shallow and misleading by some church leaders, it has found an enthusiastic audience. His message affirms conservative evangelical Christianity’s faith in the Gospel message of redemptive love; at the same time, his unconventional voice and his unrelenting criticism of institutional Christianity have led to a cultlike embrace, specifically among the disaffected Christians of Generation X, who have responded not only to the free-spirited college environment in which Miller’s spiritual journey unfolds but also to his comforting assurance that religious conviction can have the same emotional impact as music.
What concerns Miller ultimately, however, is how conviction must contend inevitably with doubt. Inspired by a PBS documentary on mother penguins—which abandon their newly laid eggs in the nest for a month and still manage, by some inexplicable radar, to return to the nest in time for the eggs to hatch—Miller argues that Jesus returns unfailingly even to the souls most grievously cut by doubt. Humanity, thus, can be fixed only one soul at a time. Resisting the rich pull of God’s love generates much of the world’s misery and mayhem.
Although the argument can seem naïve, the core of Miller’s conviction rests on his argument that the heart craves awe, that worship was intended to be centrally a mystical experience, and that centuries of Christian theology, obscure doctrinal disputes, and fierce terroritoriality have distracted the Christian Gospel. Miller moves contemporary Christianity beyond judgments, beyond intolerance, beyond distrust, and beyond the walls of churches to offer the unconditional love of God as a way to free the soul from the burden of the self. Miller liberates Christianity from function-specific buildings and documents how contemporary Christians in the most mundane circumstances—shopping at the Safeway, watching South Park with a friend, camping on the floor of the Grand Canyon—can experience the tectonic immediacy (and consequent serenity) of Christian spirituality, which offers nothing less than a tangible interaction with a loving God. The collection closes with an offer extended to the reader to ask Jesus for forgiveness and to fall in love with Jesus.
Sources for Further Study
- Lamott, Annie. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. A bittersweet collection of essays that are each a reflection on pivotal, if everyday moments of the author’s journey toward enlightenment. Miller has often cited this as his model for Blue Like Jazz.
- Miller, Donald. http://www.donaldmillerwords.com. Miller’s Web site, regularly updated with an ongoing journal of his Christian experience. Includes biography, book reviews, contact numbers, and a helpful chapter-by-chapter study guide to Blue Like Jazz.
- Miller, Donald. Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road. 2000. Rev. ed. Nashville, Tenn.: Nelson, 2005. Miller’s first work, updated after the success of Blue Like Jazz. In the American road trip genre, influenced by John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, it tells of the trip taken by Miller and a friend from Texas to Oregon. An indispensable prequel to the essays in Blue Like Jazz.
