After enthusing over "Blue Like Jazz" and getting everyone I could to read it, I thought I'd put a bit on here about "Searching For God Knows What". Quite often I'll read a book I really like through once quickly and then again more slowly, but I have to admit that I had to read "Searching..." again from the beginning before I understood some bits of it. This has a lot to to with Donald Miller's style: he offers lots of fragmentary episodes and thoughts and it's only after picking up quite a lot of the pieces and looking at them that I was able to get an idea of the whole picture. Then again, one of the clear aims of the book is to talk about why Christian self-help books, or a theology of three easy steps, are missing the point, so there's an (I guess) conscious avoidance of that kind of formula. Basically he expands on some of the ideas in "Blue..." and looks in more depth at what it means to have a relationship with God as a person, rather than as some kind of heavenly vending machine, giving out miracles and tickets for heaven in return for the appropriate amounts of faith and prayers. There's an assumption that, as an unregenerate social constructionist, I was happy to go along with, that we are created so that someone or something else tells us who we are. So we're intended to find our identity through the first and only perfect relationship: with God, in Eden. But then sin spoils this, and from then on we're spending all our time looking for someone or something else to tell us who we are. Miller uses a couple of different analogies to talk about the effect of sin: Chernobyl and Mount St Helens. Both are examples of a one-off catastrophe that has ongoing effects, and Miller says that this is like the effect that sin has on the human heart: we're conscious that we've become imperfect, and so we get into one of the main themes of the book: the lifeboat game. This is the game that still often gets played with small children and at team-building events - you have to imagine that there are certain people in a lifeboat, and one of them must die if the others are to live. How to make the decision about who is to die; in other words, how do we make decisions about other people's (and our own) worth? Miller goes into a lot of depth about the different ways that this game gets played out, and in how many areas of life we compare ourselves and others; how putting others down, establishing who is "in" or "out", distinguishing between one kind of person and another, are all part of the lifeboat game. We may know we're doing it, but we still do it as long as we're aware that sin has somehow ruined us, has separated us from the one perfect relationship that lets us know who we are. We still try to find our place in a pecking order, desperate not to be down at the bottom and having our worst fears about ourselves confirmed by a jury of our peers. The message of Jesus, in this context is this: Stop playing the lifeboat game. Give up trying to be rich - give away your goods to the poor. Give up trying to be in with the right crowd - go and spend time with the people nobody else wants. Be small, be last, be as unimportant as a little child in a grown-up world. And do this, not because it's a step in a four-step programme, or because it's a spiritual discipline, but because Jesus through the cross has taken away the sin that scarred and disfigured you, and through the resurrection has opened up the way to a relationship with the Father that can truly let you know who you are, and through the Spirit is transforming you more and more into the likeness of the One in whose image you are made.
Now this (especially the last bit) is my understanding of "Searching..." rather than an accurate precis, and is more a statement of how it is fitting in with my thinking at the moment anyway. As Miller points out, in this book and elsewhere, relationships with real people are much scarier than interacting with a vending machine, and I suspect that a lot of the time I still think of God as some kind of unpredictable/benificent/powerful vending machine, rather than as a person whom I would like to get to know better. I'm encouraged, however, by this book and others, to keep taking steps towards finding out more about who God is, and finding myself more in him.
No comments:
Post a Comment