Blue Like Jazz

Currently Reading: TIME magazine (I asked my dad why we don’t have TIME and Newsweek laying around, like we always did. He said he reads it all online now. I said lame. (Because, you see, I really like magazines.) So he came home today with one of each for me!)

I just finished rereading Blue Like Jazz. At first, I was rushing through it – until I remembered how much I love it. I had forgotten just how good Don Miller is at capturing vulnerability and truth and humanity and especially beauty, and all of this entangled in Christian spirituality, and the way his words and stories can grip my heart and resonate deeply  (like this passage, from another of his books that I read last year). And plus he is clever and he just gets it. When I remembered, all of this I tried to slow down to better enjoy it, allowing myself one chapter a day.

Y’all, I would put chapters of his words in here for you to read if that wouldn’t be obnoxious, so I’ll share just a few passages. (Then you should probably go read the whole thing for yourselves.)*

“The magical proposition of the gospel, once free from the clasps of fairy tale, was very adult to me, very gritty like something from Hemingway or Steinbeck, like something with copious amounts of sex and blood. Christian spirituality was not a children’s story. It wasn’t cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.”

“’…to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously.’”

 

“'So then you started reading the Bible?’ I asked.

‘Yes. We would eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes and read the Bible, which is the only way to do it, if you ask me. Don, the Bible is so good with chocolate. I always though the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn’t. It is a chocolate thing.”’

“The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me.”

“…Wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don’t think there is any better worship than wonder.”

“The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. It is a music birthed out of freedom. And that is the closest thing I know to Christian spirituality. A music birthed out of freedom. Everybody sings their song the way they feel it, everybody closes their eyes and lifts up their hands.”

*If you are in Charlottesville, I can hook you up with a free copy (c/o the House of Pain basement). Just holler.

[image via Whimsicalities]