Blue Like Jazz: Donald Miller

As a Jazz Musician, I found it disappointing to find Miller's book had little or nothing to do with Jazz. I've read too much Christian literature lately, and Miller's book is another in a long line of tired attempts to modernize American Christianity beyond its "conservative traditional" mystique. I have commented elsewhere in this blog on Emergent Christianity, and how impressive it is that given its assumptions each of us could in fact become our own Church, with our own sense of Church authority, whatever that might mean for any particular individual, I'm not sure.

I have often observed that both Right and Left winged American Evangelical Christianity are children of Emerson with different emphasis. The choruses they sing are Walt Whitman's Song of Myself where "Jesus" is a metaphor of "myself." The preaching is Emerson's monumental Self Reliance: the principle essay that still moves American politics both Right and Left, despite the fact that fewer and fewer of us have read it.

Miller is just another in a long line of American self invented Christians. One must admire his poetry, and good humor and his writing style. He has his own "particularism" reminiscent of Anne Lamott, or even Victor Hugo, but with a Christian twist. Miller is thoughtful, modern, and "real." I mean "real" in the sense of how any self invented twenty or thirty something wants to think of themselves as "real" these days. Which probably means half-digested truths applied to a bumper sticker that seeks to be more profound than that. I suppose one could call it "post-modern" as numerous reviews I read of it did. But post-modern is a much brandied about term in Christian circles, and I seriously doubt any of them have ever read Lyotard.

What would Emerson have made of Miller and his fellow emergents? I think perhaps he would approve of the contradictions inherent in Miller's framework as much as he would like the over-all freedom of it. If Christianity is "blue like Jazz," than it also necessarily is as individual, personal, and free to be whatever it happens to be. "Everybody sings their song the way they feel it. Everybody lifts up their hands."

In the end its not a question of intellect but one's own personal experience. It is always about the self, yet Miller in Anne Lamott fashion, with good humor, dismisses his self's ability to make a clear judgement. Only an American Christian can be so self driven while insisting the self is no longer relevant. Miller writes "The most difficult lie I ever contended with is this: life is a story about me." Yet Walt Whitman has his revenge after-all as Miller's profound journey is in the nether regions of his self awareness. The problems of the world are not out there, but inside Miller himself "The needy thing in his chest." What can set it free other than a new self alignment? That in the end is his prescription and I can only shake my head in awe of the audacity of it all.

American Christians like Miller are selfish selves, who humble themselves, give of themselves to God, who also lives in them and contends with themselves. God gets all the glory but he lives with-in them. Does the self reap the glory in the end? I suspect that it does.

Miller recounts humorous experiences of Individuals undergoing a "God thing." Can they ever separate the self from the God? Such a question is necessarily alien to them, as the nuances of their language allow a strange "knowing" distinction. Such a knowing is the "spark" or the "gnostic" urge so celebrated by Walt Whitman and Emerson, which can also be found in Kabbalah.

The God with-in apprehends the God with-out, or so Emerson thought. I love the poetry, though I fear the social/political consequences are something else. The nuances of doctrine are no longer necessary in Miller, only the particulars of situation. One of my favorite Emerson quotes is: "Our prayers are the disease of the will, and our creeds the disease of the intellect." Would Miller go that far? I suspect he would. Only an Emersonian Christian could somehow appropriate at least the last half of this formulation, the way Miller does. My hat is off to him and his audacious quest. Is it freedom he gains? I often wonder, is it freedom for the self? Or from other selves? I suspect the later, despite emergent Christian protestations to the contrary.

This book will last a short period in American consciousness as the Christian Church undergoes another metamorphosis, with an increasing hunger for the "fresh" perspectives. The sentiments of Miller, which belong to Emerson and Walt Whitman are timeless and have so infected Leftward Evangelical Christianity that I can scarcely distinguish them.