Confessions from reading Blue Like Jazz

July 9, 2008

These thoughts came to me while reading Donald Miller’s book, and feed my growing resentment of him. I recognize them as problems, but cannot honestly say that I am willing to surrender them.

1) I think I am intellectually and morally superior to everyone on the planet.

This specific combination makes it easy to live without a great deal of cognitive dissonance. If I meet someone who is possibly smarter than I am, I can mentally accuse him of pride (oh the irony!) or some other moral failing. If I meet someone demonstrably more virtuous, I can attack some weakness in the mental component of her creed. Those two strategies failing, I can also say to myself, “I could be that smart/virtuous if I wanted to.” I call this last tactic the “not yet” strategy, and think fondly that it makes me more like Saint Augustine.

2) Miller states that he wants his spirituality to take away his hatred for people, not justify it. Honestly, I want just the opposite.

I have a burning lust for vindication. I care much more about “rightness” (and subsequently other people’s “wrongness”) than I do about Truth. I would rather hate people for their perceived weaknesses than love them for their inherit, or even incidental, value—incidental value being the thing that even the pagans love (see Luke 6:27-36). And the worst part is, I really like it that way. I like having good, compelling, rational reasons for hating people, or at least condescending them. I don’t so much like the idea of accepting on faith the notion of their value.

Thank you, Lord, that I’m not like other men and have mercy on me, a sinner.

3) I genuinely believe I’m the most important person in the room, no matter who else is in the room or how big the room is.

The idea of treating people as more important than myself—because I actually believe they are—is as terrifying and offense to me as dying for my enemies. I can construct cogent, satisfying arguments as to why I am the best, brightest, or most important, and I am as unwilling to surrender my arguments as I am unwilling to surrender the conclusions for whose sake I manufactured the arguments.

4) I don’t want to surrender anything on faith except those sins that have no natural appeal to me, or those sins that are immediately and obviously unpleasant in their consequences. I don’t want my faith to really cost me.

Hence, why I don’t want these four things I guess. I have no problem surrendering excessive drinking, as I’ve never been prone to it. Lust, I surrender, in spite of its appeal, because of its ruinous consequences. Loving unlovable people, however, is a different matter. I actually have to surrender something tangible on faith and receive no tangible return. I don’t necessarily want to hate or harm the unlovable, but I’d very much like to ignore them. I like the parts of my faith that increase my comfort, as though it were God’s chief concern. And I’d kind of like to live in that fallacy, ignorant of how ridiculous it is.

Posted in Blue Like Jazz, Personal