Guest Post: Love and Pancakes

I'm amused, encouraged, and excited to host/post today a guest post from a good friend of mine. The post is vaguely a review of "Blue Like Jazz" by Don Miller - but with more of a personal slant and some great observations. I hope you enjoy it!

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The subtitle to Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz is ‘nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality’. Don never fully explains what exactly this means. I think it’s because Don is trying to discuss relationship with Christ through feeling. Blue Like Jazz is not a book of systematic theology. It is more of a novel.

To an extent, this is about human feelings. I am happy, I am sad, and that sort of thing. But beyond that, Don Miller is exploring the moments in life that we cannot explain. This is in part expressed through the title of the book.

Miller at one point quotes G.K. Chesterton, who said in Orthodoxy that ‘chess players go crazy, not poets’. What Miller is trying to say is that you can make yourself crazy trying to explain what he calls Christian spirituality. He believes it is inexplicable, but it is ‘beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul’. Don reckons that this is similar at heart to free-form jazz.

I like jazz, but I don’t know much about it, so I feel I can better explain it through another kind of music.

For me, Bob Dylan is one of my favourite musicians. I like to listen to lots of his songs, and I talk about his music to my friends. I was talking to a friend recently, and we agreed that Bob Dylan’s voice is not actually very great. It’s distinctive and iconic, but he’s not always tuneful. Neither is he the greatest guitarist. But there is something about Bob Dylan’s music that rings true for me and resonates in my soul. His success and his status as a cultural icon would suggest I’m not alone in this belief.

Most of the first half of Blue Like Jazz is an exploration of the Miller’s belief that this conviction is very similar (if not the very same) to the conviction a believer has in their relationship with Jesus and their faith in the existence of God.

I like this. I like that I can understand the way God speaks to my soul through the pale imitation of a mark that Bob Dylan’s music leaves. In a later chapter, Miller describes the difficulty a friend had in coming to faith, believing that she was a fraud and that a confession to a belief in God and the power of Christ’s forgiveness would be as fake and as empty as trying to fall in love with someone, or trying to decide that pancakes are your favourite food.

I don’t fully understand the structure of theology, but I think that if you’re more systematic, this feeling of ‘rational faith’ as some call it is best summed up by William Lane Craig in this particular exchange. I like this, but I also like the love and pancakes idea, because it resonates – and because I like pancakes.

In a similar vein, Miller also talks about the time a living, feeling spiritual God ‘who speaks to men’s souls’ and ‘answered un-asked’ questions replaced his perception of a ‘slot machine’ God, who would deal Don good fortune as long as the cherries lined up.

This is something I firmly believe in. My God feels, and he speaks to my soul.

There is a danger in misunderstanding this idea. Understanding God through our personal experience is, I think, one of the best and most important ways our relationship with him develops and deepens. But my understanding of God must stem from more than my personal experience.

Based only on personal experience, my God does not have the power to resurrect from the dead. And by this I mean a Talitha, Lazarus or Jesus sort of work, rather than a Fabrice Muamba kind of work. Based only on personal experience, my God does not have the power to part the Red Sea or to bring down the walls of Jericho.

This is not a point that Miller opposes or glosses over, giving the example of God’s people in the Old Testament.

Even for those who did experience God very personally, personal experience itself is not enough. The very Israelites who passed through the Red Sea built a golden calf to replace their God, because they didn’t feel they could interact with him personally enough. The same God who punished the Egyptians with plagues, delivered them from slavery and parted a sea for them.

Miller says that the big problem is that people want to feel too much. This is why people built golden calves in ancient times, and this is why people wear crystals and star-gaze and things like that these days. It is why people say things like ‘your God’ and ‘my God’, because they are only willing to pick and choose what they like from their own feelings and experiences.

Without feelings we cannot experience God. Without the Bible I don’t think we can really know who he is. I think I needed my feelings in order for the Spirit to convict me of my sin. I know that without the Bible, there would have been no chance of rescue from that conviction.

I am afraid that you won’t get quite a good enough feel of what Blue Like Jazz is until you read through the book for yourself. Don Miller reflects on so many aspects of faith that it would be boring to attempt to cover each one here, and would detract from the way he does it. But I think the spirit of the book is that Christian spirituality is about a relationship rather than a formula. And that like any other human relationship, human feeling plays a huge part, without defining it.