blogs :: Ex Veritate Vita :: October 14, 2009

Donald Miller and Hauerwas, on the same team?

by Jasmine Wilson

I would have never thought I'd associate Donald Miller with Stanley Hauerwas.

Donald Miller is from my hometown of Portland, OR, and as such when he's been to Calvin, I'm always really excited. His popularity confirms that where I'm from is a really cool place, which I believe but hardly anyone here really knows. When I picked up Blue Like Jazz last year, though, I wasn't really all that excited about it. It was interesting, but I wasn't going to go out and by the precious moments figurines of it or anything. Then, he came last October to Calvin, and I found out last minute and went with some friends. I was horribly disappointed, because that was in the last few weeks before the Presidential election, and he was here as part of Obama's campaign team, of all things!!! I had written an article for the school newspaper explaining why I thought it was best not to vote, which I can assure you, hardly anyone really understands, let alone believes it themselves. So my friends and I got in a mildly heated debate as we left and I expressed my utter disappointment.

But this year he came as part of a book tour he's doing at 65 cities around the country. He even had an opener, which was a strange phenomena for an author, to me at least; she was another author who just read her book called "Angry Conversations with God" (Susan Isaccs). But this time, Don did not let me down. I really had low expectations after the previous year, so he way exceeded them. He told the story of his experience when his book was going to get turned into a movie, and how that got him on the track to realize that his life was too boring for the screen... which made him wonder what makes a story good? He then spent a lot of time studying narrative structure, which really excited me, because I think that was part of the problem I had with Blue Like Jazz. It did not have a narrative structure that I could really follow and appreciate, it just felt like it was so disconnected. In his lecture, Miller explained how when you are asked a question like "how did you meet your wife?" you will relate the story in the proper narrative structure, which is to say, express it as a character who wants something, experiences conflict, and then hopefully gets what he or she wants.

Now why did I say he and Hauerwas are on the same team? Well, I admit, I am a Hauerwas fan, but I have not read as much of him as I should. I read Resident Aliens and it changed my life so completely, I'm a little afraid to read anything else because it can't have that same conversion-experience effect. But I do know that what I loved about Resident Aliens from the very beginning (there were a lot of things that I had to be converted before I could fully appreciate, but this I loved from the first), was his chapter on story. I had a teacher in high school who taught the Bible as story, and it was amazing. Literally mind-blowing. Hauerwas, I know, is associated with the termed "Narrative Theology," and although I don't entirely know the intricate details of that perspective, I think Miller would subscribe to that view as well. Miller is different because he appeals to the popular culture, of course, and Hauerwas feels as if he has not been truthful enough if at least one student doesn't get offended and leave his class. However, Miller said that he felt all of our stories were just the subplot of the epic story. Christ was not the climax of our stories. We only find significance in our stories when we associate ourselves with the overall story that appears in Scripture.

WOAH! Really, Donald Miller!! Yay! This is wonderful! Now, I did hear criticism that the lecture was very self-affirming, because Miller did tell a ton of stories about himself. However, I thought it was sort of appropriate that while he was talking about how we should live our lives as if they were cinematic stories (that is, good stories) he constructed his lecture as a story in which he wanted to figure something out, experienced conflict, then is now in the process of doing it. For Miller, this happens in the form of a ministry he has started that equips churches to have mentoring programs for young men.  (He himself grew up without a father, and cited many statistics of various criminals who grew up in households without a father as well).

I look forward to seeing other things from Miller in the coming years.