Searching for God Knows What

I just finished this a few minutes ago.  Donald Miller is by far one of my favorite authors.  He wrote Blue Like Jazz which walked me through a very bleak time in my life.  Searching for God Knows what is quite different from Blue Like Jazz, but Miller writes in the same style.  He has a way of making you feel as if you've somehow stumbled upon excerpts of his own inner dialogue.  I know people that love this way of writing and others that cannot follow it and give up two chapters in.  I happen to love it.

This book was harder for me to get through.  I wasn't hanging on every word, drinking in the beautiful ideas and sentiments as in Blue Like Jazz.  The two books are about different topics though so I suppose it's unfair of me to compare them like this.  Searching for God Knows What is deep, really deep.  Reading Miller's thoughts on why our society is competitive, petty and broken is mind boggling.  In the last chapter he shows how Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is actually a comparison to our faith in Christian Spirituality and what a relationship with Jesus should look like.  While reading, I spent most of my time wondering how the heck he comes up with this stuff, and imagining him lying in bed at night, puzzling over the mysteries of this world and that of the spiritual realm, and just generally being brilliant.

I'm really not one for religious books, and neither is Miller.  He talks at length about "religious formulas" and the the threat they have on our true spirituality.  He is clearly a post-modernist and I love that.  The book is about coming back to a true relationship with God, a love as good and pure as Romeo and Juliet's.  

I can also see why most conservative Christians don't support Miller and his ideas.  He did call the church a whore, but he was quoting Augustine.  Everything he wrote I really feel is true, on a very primitive human level.  Like he tapped into something so much deeper than anything that has attempted to explain the human condition in the psychological and sociological fields.  It's definitely worth a re-read once I can let some things sink in a little more.

Next up is either Through Painted Deserts (also by Miller) or The Power of One.  I'm a little burnt out on these spiritual books and would like something with a plot, but the last installment of my own little "Miller Trilogy" has more of an  On the Road feel and talks about his discoveries on a lot of issues through a road trip.  By the time I post my next review, you'll know what I chose :)