Book Review: Blue Like Jazz

So... I've been meaning to chat about this book for some time now. So amazing. Love it... here's some highlights:

After seeing the woman in front of him pay for her groceries with food stamps, he says this, reflecting on the experience...

On the drive over the mountain that afternoon, I realized that it was not the woman who should be pitied, it was me. Somehow I had come to believe that because a person is in need, they are candidates for sympathy, not just charity. It was not that I wanted to buy her groceries, the government was already doing that. I wanted to buy her dignity. And yet, by judging her, I was the one taking her dignity away.

So true. How much of life and how we treat other people is our own mental blocks? How much of our preconceived notions prevent us from having relationships with people or learning from them, because we feel they have nothing to teach us? How much to we judge the quality of a person's life by the monetary status they hold?
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More quotes...

That's when I realized that believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is like making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon... I have come to think that belief is something that happens to us too. Sure, there is some data involved, but mostly it is this deep, deep conviction, like what Julie's mom feels about her husband, this idea that life sabout this thing and it really isn't an option for it to be about something else.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. Given my state of being at this point, I could say that really, I believe in God and that He is good from past experience with Him. I don't feel like I understand what His relation is with the world at this point... Like I don't know how much He cares about my job or my apartment... but somehow, He seems to take particularly good care of my needs (or is that just random chance?). Because, then, why wouldn't he take particularly good care of the needs of millions of starving/malnoutritioned/dying people around the world? Aside from that, if I say that beliefs are things that just "happen to you", where is the sense of measurement for which beliefs correspond with reality and which don't? Mormons believe in something called "special revelation" or something like that, where the Mormon religion is revealed to them as truth and that's how they know. Sweet. Good for them. I've talked to Christians who believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that God revealed to them certain things about the validity of their religion. But they contradict each other in certain aspects - specifically about Jesus and Satan's relationships, the role of humanity in the afterlife, how we got here... actually in a lot of things. So which is true? And why should I believe that? If it makes me a better person to believe something, is that enough to justify believing it? I don't know. If believing that I can fly makes me feel okay about riding in an airplane, that's great until the airplane starts to crash and I don't take a parachute because I think I can fly. Hmmm... If being an Muslim or a Hindu or a Christian or a Mormon or a Buddhist makes me a better person (which, by the way, needs to be defined somehow), great... until I find out one or more of these beliefs is inaccurate and I go to hell... that is, if Hell exists.

Hmmm...
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Talking about a girl who went to an anti-Bush rally...

She had no idea why she didn't like George W. Bush. She only went to a rally and heard a good band and saw a lot of cool people with cool clothes and hippie haircuts. She decided what to believe based on whether other people who believed it were of a particular fashion that appealed to her. I saw myself in her quite a bit and that scared me.

Seriously. This is one of my pet peeves - probably because I see it in myself and it freaks me out. As a normal child, I believed everything people told me - that's great. But part of maturity is learning to think for yourself and comparing and contrasting different ideas in order to form and articulate opinions. Obviously, learning is a constant process, but it's important to begin as early as possible. It's okay not to know all the answers, but don't be passionately against or for things you don't understand. I do it, but that's one of the things I'm trying to change about my life...
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In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn't do it, and morevoer, that I didn't want to defend the term. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. "Then why don't you want to defend Christianity?" he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won't do it. Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people? I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and he likes me. The host looked ack at me with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together. He told me how much he didn't like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God.

Interesting. So my first reaction is, 'I wonder what people think of that word.' And then my next thought is 'What do I think about that word?' Well... I need more time to ponder that, but for now, my first reactions are... Christianity... religion... God... doctrines... Sunday school... Jesus Christ... questions... wondering... those are my gut reactions... what are yours?
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Here are a few more good quotes...

The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something. And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything.

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A friend of mine, a young pastor who recently started a church, talks to me from time to time about the new face of church in America - about the postmodern church. He says the new church will be different from the old one, that we will be relevant to culture and the human struggle. I don't think any church has ever been relevant to culture, to the human struggle, unless it believed in Jesus and the power of His gospel. If the supposed new church believes in trendy music and cool Web pages, then it is not relevant to culture either. It is just another tool of Satan to get people to be passionate about nothing.

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The human struggle bothered Rick, as if something was broken in hte world and we were supposed to hold our palsm agasint the wound. He didn't really see evangelism, or whatever you want to call it, as a target on a wall in which the goal is to get people to agree with us about the meaning of life. He saw evangelism as reaching a felt need. I though this was beautiful and firghtening. I thought it was beautiful because I had this same need; I mean, I really knew I needed Jesus like I need water or food, and yet it was frightening because Christianity is so stupid to so much of our culture, and I absolutely hate bothering people about this stuff.

Okay... that's enough for now. Thoughts?