The other day, I was sitting in the car while my wife ran in to the Dollar General (the high glamour life of a pastor, for sure!). It was Saturday afternoon, so I was able to catch This American Life on NPR. For those who have never heard the show, here’s how the producers describe it on the website:

whenever we try to describe it in a sentence or two, it sounds awful. For instance: Each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn’t sound like something we’d want to listen to on the radio, and it’s our show. In the early days of the program, in frustration, we’d sometimes tell public radio program directors that it’s basically just like Car Talk. Except just one guy hosting. And no cars.”

It really is better than it sounds. The stories are just the right mix of everyday detail and emotion with the absurd to keep you interested. The stories are always told using a lot of concrete imagery, helping the “mind’s eye” visualize while also sufficient playing the emotions. For example, one of the stories that day was about a family who owned a pet bull, had him cloned and treated the clone like the original, only to be gored twice and put in the hospital. It was better than it sounds (the story, not the goring).

As I was listening to the show and have listened many times before, I began to be amazed at just how enraptured they had me. The stories draw on everyday, real-life experience to make you feel comfortable, but they pull just enough from the bizarre to keep you interested and all the while, they wrap you up in emotions you forgot you had. As I listened, I started thinking how much the show was like good writing and then I realized something peculiar. These were all of the reasons that seem to make Donald Miller such a good writer.

Some of you might be thinking to yourselves, “Wait a minute, I thought Brent just wrote a critique of Donald Miller…” I did and I think he’s a great writer. The two are not mutually exclusive. While I disagree with many of Miller’s conclusions, I have been thinking about Miller’s writing style since I read Blue Like Jazz some time last year.

Miller is one of those rare writers who is able to draw from the everyday without becoming boring, to connect with the common without lowering the standard and making the reader feel welcome without making them so comfortable that they drift off. Miller has a masterful use of details, and weaves words with an artisan’s hand. Consider the oft-quoted introduction from Blue Like Jazz:

“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theoater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.”

Before any of what happened? We instinctively want to know because we’ve all had this experience, maybe not with jazz and a saxophonist, but something has unexpectedly stopped us and forced us to reconsider our preconceived notions. We immediately relate. Plus, “blue like jazz” is a wonderful poetic line!

I’ve also had many of these same thoughts as I read Andrée Seu’s “Won’t Let You Go Unless You Bless Me,” a collection of essays from the World magazine regular. The collection of essays roughly chronicles the time after Seu’s husband died and she found herself newly-widowed. She writes:

“There were about give minutes of new widowhood when I grasped that I was now in a special demographic where eyes would be on my watching to see God glorified in my circumstances. There was teh blinking of an eye when I saw opportunity - a stage for God’s ‘power in weakness’ show, a chance to prove Satan wrong …”

Seu and Miller succeed with the written word where This American Life succeeds with the spoken word. They write with passion, yet they make their poitns with subtlety, they write in understandable prose while weaving imagery throughout and they draw from everyday life enough to provide a common base, yet they do it without dumbing down or leaving out the literary allusions. In short, they write very well.

Some time ago, I wrote a piece entitled “Pastor as Poet” in which I lamented the state of modern theological and homiletical language. Why is it that we can write about the most exciting things we will ever encounter, God, salvation and yet resort to merely academic language? Where is the poetry of the soul? Seu and Miller remind us that those with the most to write about ought to be those with the most to write about! Thank you.

• Visit the This American Life official website
• Buy This American Life: Lies, Sissies and Fiascoes (a CD)
• Buy Crimebusters & Crossed Wires: Stories from This American Life (CD)
• Buy Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz
• Buy Donald Miller’s Searching For God Knows What
  
• Buy Won’t Let You Go Unless You Bless Me by André Seu
• Read my piece “Pastor as Poet”