Page ix – “I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz music.Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.”
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So here it is, my first book review. Actually, it's more of a book sample...hope that's OK. I love this book! I read it last summer on family vacation at a beautiful lake spot in northern Minnesota. I have this passion for what feels real inside of me to be presented credibly to people in my circles. I think Donald Miller does a lot of that in Blue Like Jazz. He's put words and stories to dozens of the deep things I feel.
Like the opening quote. Music and spirituality are very commingled in my day to day. The mysterious actualization I feel happens in both places, and I think in many instances I have observed that with someone else before it became real to me. Great picture!
Maybe the takeaway for me tonight is to live my life like a street saxophonist. I've seen them across the way and heard the sonorous melodies echoing down Nicollet Ave in Minneapolis and in downtown Kansas City. It's tasting the moment, blowing your pain and pleasure through the horn, just being. I love to just be. But I think it's also about reveling in the resonance when it's there.
I listened to a guy present a software upgrade at work today and my heart jumped because he was so into it and so into us. It was music. God doesn't always resolve, not here and now or on demand. Sometimes God just is, like the 7-note blues scale repeated over and over, always changing in timbre and feel. I don't want to miss a note.
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I'd love your feedback here or on Facebook. And if your feedback isn't for public consumption, just message me or email instead.
2 comments:
I tried to read this book, I tried to like this book because it was popular, but I just didn't connect with it. Maybe it's the young guy-ness of it all. I don't know, but it seemed to be missing something, or maybe I am missing something. It just seemed to be not really Christian, if I can put it that way. Not that I am a traditionalist, but there are some things that didn't seem to be there for me.
Linda, interesting. This is why we need variety out there, eh? I found the content of the book to be rich and profound. Yeah, from what I know of you it is a bit surprising that you didn't care for it, but that's OK. I'll likely have another quote or two from it soon.
Appreciate your comment. All my other blog comments have come on the Facebook side, so you're blazing a new trail.
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