Blue Like Jazz.
written by Julie R. Neidlinger 3 comments link this postBlue Like Jazz is a "me, too!" book.
It's that moment when you've reached the end of your limit wondering what's wrong with you and if you're normal or not and if anyone else in the world could possibly understand you and if you're alone and then some person says something that completely nails exactly what you're about and you want to holler "me, too!"
Me, too.
Chapter 14, entitled "Alone: Fifty-three Years in Space" is where I started to really yell at Donald Miller, the author of the book.
"How did he know this!?!" I scribbled in the margin. "Who told him?!"
When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social... There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface.
[...]
When I lived alone it was very hard for me to be around people. I would leave parties early. I would leave church before worship was over so I didn't have to stand around and talk. The presence of people would agitate me. I was so used to being able to daydream and keep myself company that other people were an intrusion. It was terribly unhealthy.
I re-read that chapter. And again. How Miller knew all these things is that I am not abnormal and neither is he and people everywhere experience what he described. I know that irritation of just being in the presence of people; I experienced it this year in Nicaragua. Twenty-two people. All talking to me. I thought I might die.
Me, too.
Miller talks about church, about faith, about money, about confession, about romance -- and he talks right to you so honestly that whether you've lived his life (which is impossible) you'll still see your own supposedly private thoughts and questions right there on the page.
Me, too.
After his chapter on what being alone does to a person, which I can attest to, he stumbles into love a few pages later. Not just romantic love, but how to love people, and how to love yourself. In describing a time when he lived with "hippies", he tells of how he came to feel loved.
I liked them very much because they were interested in me.
[...]
But more than they talked, they listened.
[...]
I did not feel fat or stupid or sloppily dressed. I did not feel like I did not know the Bible well enough, and I was never conscious what my hands were doing or whether or not I sounded immature when I talked.
[...]
My Christian communities had always had little unwritten social ethics like don't cuss and don't support Democrats... There was love in the Christian community, but it was conditional love... If people were bad, we treated them as though they were evil or charity...
[...]
I was tired of Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand separating the good army from the bad one.
[...]
The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money.
[...]
When we barter with it, we all lose. When the church does not love its enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more.
Miller really expounds on this way of thinking of love, and how in the past he had used love to reward or to punish, to discipline those who irritated him or were not "worthy" by withholding true love. His big moment, the big revelation that finally came to him is going to sound so simple, but I found myself nearly wearing a hole in the page with my highlighter pencil: "I was free to love."
This was something that astounded me. I have always felt we are to love, but with conditions, out of fear that by loving someone who was sinning, I would condone their sin. Never mind that I, myself, am a sinner currently struggling with sin, and am still loved.
After talking about loving others, Miller talks about loving ourselves. This was a chapter I normally would wrinkle my nose at because it seems as if there is nothing but a push for self. However, all the selfishness and me-ness of this culture does little to help people love themselves. The important point here being that until we are able to "receive love", as Miller puts it, we cannot truly show love for others.
My eye would find things on television and in the media and somehow I would compare myself to them without really knowing I was doing it, and this really screwed me up because I never for a second felt I was worthy of anybody's compliments.
(emphasis mine)
I would find myself getting depressed about conversations that never even took place.
I know this. The time spent inside my head becomes real and I find my mood changing based on things that have never happened.
Miller made the point that our value has to come from God, not any other person or external pressure; it must be from God. Then he relates how he reads the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself for the first time.
I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talked to myself.
Me, too. Me, too.
And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.
Please read this book. Christian leaders all over have been nit-picking its theology since it was published four years ago, missing the point that it isn't about doctrine and instead, that everyone, at some point, needs to know that there are others out there who know what we're about. We just need to hear that we're not alone, that we're not abnormal. We need something to help pick us up and say we're OK and that there are others just like us with the same struggle, running the same race.
Read this book.
It's for you, too.
Labels: book reviews, recommended reading
Copyright (c) Julie R. Neidlinger 3/24/2007 08:04:00 PM
SHARE THIS POST: Facebook | Stumble It! | Del.icio.us | DiggIt! | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | Newsvine
Like this post? Subscribe to the feed.
Click here to help support this site.
3 Comments:
I love how C.S. Lewis talks about loving our neighbors as ourselves, too (in "Mere Christianity", I think). He points out how we so often excuse ourselves and accuse others. What would it look like if we extended the same amount of grace to our neighbors as we extend to ourselves???
n.
By 
, at
March 26, 2007 10:24 AM
I think it goes both ways. I do allow myself excuses for inconsistent behavior and levy hypocrisy charges against someone else who is doing the exact thing I am.
But what Miller was getting at, and I know he's right because it's the same for me, is that the conversations we carry on inside of our heads are brutal and we would never talk to another person that way.
I tell myself terrible things, that I am stupid and ugly and a failure and a loser and so on -- I would never, ever say that to another person and I don't even THINK that about another person. Yet I allow myself to do that to me.
In some ways I love myself more than my neighbor (like the first part) and in some ways, I hate myself in a bad, harmful way (like the second part). I have to correct both extremes. It's a tough commandment, to love my neighbor as myself. I miss it on all levels, it seems.
His point was well-made...
By 
Julie, at
March 26, 2007 10:41 AM
Blue Like Jazz is one of my favorite books, period. It, along with with Mike Yaconelli's "Messy Spirituality," is the book that has most influenced my thinking about faith and many other things besides. A truly monumental work.
In other words, me too.
By Jim, at
March 26, 2007 6:19 PM
