Blue Like Jazz

Today's reading is Chapter 1 of Blue Like Jazz.

Most of us carry a first picture of God long before we can explain it. In Chapter 1, Miller describes the sense of God approaching him on a dirt road. God is not chasing him down. God is walking toward him. He also traces his guilt back to boyhood. Around age ten he found a pornographic magazine, and separately he felt guilty over a Christmas gift for his mother. Miller takes both moments as early revelations about God. From there he asks two honest questions: does guilt push people toward religion, and does religion actually relieve it? He closes with Rembrandt's painting of the prodigal son's return, which shows a welcoming father.

Luke 15 is the story behind that painting. The younger son asks for his share of the property, travels to a far country, and squanders it in reckless living. Then a famine hits, and he ends up feeding pigs, so hungry that he longs for the pods the pigs eat. Notice the turning point: “when he came to himself.” Nobody drags him home. Hunger and honesty do their work, and he starts planning a return.

Look closely at the plan, though. He rehearses a speech that ends with “Treat me as one of your hired servants.” He thinks guilt means he has to bargain his way back in. That is how many of us handle guilt. We hide, or we negotiate, or we try to pay the debt ourselves.

Then the father moves first. “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” The father has been watching the road. The son's trip home is real, but it is met by someone already coming toward him. When the son begins his confession, the father's very next words are orders to the servants: the best robe, a ring, shoes, a feast. The father does not ask him to work off the debt. He names what has happened: “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.”

Miller's dirt-road image fits this scene. It also echoes Genesis 3, where after the first sin God comes walking in the garden and calls out to the man, “Where are you?” God's first move toward guilty people is to come looking for them, not to scold them.

That does not make guilt useless. In Miller's telling, guilt gets your attention. The question is where it sends you. It can send you into hiding and bargaining, or it can send you toward a Father who is already on the road.

If your guilt feels crushing, or it is tied to something that was done to you rather than something you did, please talk with a pastor, counselor, or trusted friend. You do not have to sort it out alone.