don miller
...so i went to hear don speak at Pacific University Wednesday.....
i had heard through the grapevine that he wasn't a very good speaker. i thought to myself when i heard this, "well duh, he's a writer, not a speaker..." but i was pleasantly surprised by his lecture.....if you ever have a chance to hear him speak i highly recommend it!
this was just what i needed too because he put into words (his own) again what i was talking about in one of my previous posts.
i really can't wait to read more of his books....
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4 comments:
oh so lucky you are! i just read the relevant magazine interview of don. it's a neat thing to hear an author you really enjoy. i'm going to see anne lamott on monday night and can hardly wait ...
so tell me more about don's lecture. don't know if he'll ever travel to chicago!
Teresa, I was on Mary's blog. It's Saterday morning and I thought I would explore. You caught my attention with your entry on Don Miller. I was re-reading part of "Searching For" just before I got on line and was pleasently surprised. It really is a great book as was Blue Like Jazz. I fear, in our celebrity driven culture, we will attempt to turn him into our generations Max Lucado or Philip Yancy. I don't want him to be the next best thing in contemporary christina culture. Vomitus.
But don't let my ramblings distract you from how God speaks through his writing.
later.
hey allan, ya I know what you mean about the celebrity thing. i definitely think it's an easy thing to run into in our culture. it became especially revealing to me last night after watching "Hotel Rwanda" i was thinking along those lines....the irony of the american way of life and the things that worry us...and then to look at the things that worried the people going thru the genocide in Rwanda....it's just all very sobering....
for example i find myself wondering and worrying over how i can make my blog look original from everyone else's and only 11 years ago people my age were wondering and worrying over wether they were going to be sliced with a machete and survive 'till morning! the truth in comparison is almost too much...
my dogs and cat have dealt with less trauma than most people in this world!! how crazy is that?!?!?
there are much bigger things to be concerned about than celebrities; for sure!! i hear ya loud and clear!
p.s. ~ i get no distraction from your ramblings (i do that myself!) just enjoyment....i love hearing other people's perspectives on things.
well mary, i will try. i think i may do an injustice to him by trying to reiterate what was discussed but then again, i do it all the time with the bible and i feel pretty confident i get that right....(which I probably don't most of the time)....so.........A.D.D sheesh!!
ok. there were a couple of things that were great about the lecture. one, it didn't feel like a lecture and he didn't feel like a wise theologian or a professor. that was nice because i came to the lecture wondering if, because of all the book sales, they'd gone to his head and he'd become one of those guys that were full of themselves, (this, for me, would have nullified his writings) or if he actually talked and was the same person that he conveyed in his books. i found that he actually is, or seems to be, the same person conveyed in his book and the sales did not seem to have gone to his head. (for all i know, how much do you really know about a person after meeting them and hearing them babble for 20 minutes anyway? seriously.) all that to say, he was normal like i hoped and the encounter was very informal.
two, he used an analogy that i had not heard before to describe God....he talked about how we understand light. we really don't know that much about light. he said "we know that light travels at the speed of light..." (which was funny because how is that a description of what light is???) we know that we don't know much about it and that we only see what is around us because light shines on it and basically "makes" it be. i can't even begin to describe why this analogy was helpful for me, but it was....i love analogy because it can be so helpful in understanding things out of reach....like C.S.Lewis said in "Mere Christianity," if a certain analogy works for you in understanding something, use it but if it doesn't, put it down and find something else....
basically the night went like this. he introduced himself as don and then dove straight into his testimony and spent the rest of the time simply sharing what thought processes brought him to the conclusion that redemption offered by christian spirituality was the answer. he shared things that he had talked about in both Blue Like Jazz and Searching. he used the "formula of a great story" that he talked about in his Searching book (i think) where every good story has a setting, characters, conflict, climax & resolution (i think I'm missing one or two) and that "why is it and what is it that makes us respond to this formula? he supposed it was because this is our reality here on earth. he pointed out that moses in genesis gave us setting and characters.....the fall gave us conflict, i'm not sure i remember what climax was and then resolution which is the ending of the story...either redemption or not. he systematically lead us through his thought processees on that.
i also enjoyed how he made a point of the fact that somehow we think that logic and rational thought comes from the brain but that emotions come from the heart....like, how does that make any sence? he pointed out how moses would use a type of writing that we would compare to scientific calulational thinking and then it seemed that when he got to a point where he could no longer explain further, he broke out into poetic prose to further explain it.....poetry, emotions and feelings being linked together today as "heart" things and therefore not logical, rational and therefore not an acceptable way to communicate truths. don challenged that scientific thought and emotional prose are both ways to communicate truths. that somehow today, we think that unless you're scientific in your thinking about it, you can't find truth.
i'm muddling this all up now but it was really great....after that, he let people leave if they needed to and then opened up for questions. there was so much more and given what i've said, it might seem like the lecture lasted for hours but really it all got over much quicker than i thought it would!
i agree with a friend of mine who said that she thought the lecture was exceptionally good because it seemed as though since writing his books, he seemed to have processed the ideas he wrote about even further and during the lecture he articulated them much better and more concisely it seemed.
one more thing but i soo have to stop now....my comments in this post are longer than the original for pete's sake! (don't know who pete is but it's for his sake)....anyway.
i like how he answered a question about whether christianity is the only right religion........he responded by saying "no." christianity does not have all the truths there possibly are to know, nicely packed into it.....there are bits of truth to be found everywhere; even in other religions. But "christian spirituality is the only one that leads to redemption."
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