An Interview with Calvin Miller
I first heard of Calvin Miller when a girlfriend loaned me a copy of his book, The Philippian Fragment. Dr. Miller soon became one of my favorite writers. Some years later, my writing mentor at Dallas Seminary (DTS), Dr. Reg Grant, invited me to join him for a lunch with Dr. Miller, who had left the pastorate to become writer-in-residence at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS). Several months after that meeting, Dr. Miller arranged for a group of DTS students to join some SWBTS students for dinner at his and Barb’s home in Fort Worth, followed by a show—Les Miserables.
What stood out to me most that night was not the great performance, wonderful as it was. It was something Dr. Miller did. At the last minute a student who had not paid in advance showed up expecting to get in, and Dr. Miller discreetly gave the student Dr. Miller's own near-the-front ticket and bought himself a spot in one of the few remaining seats in the stratosphere. When the group gathered at the end, he quietly slipped downstairs to join us as if he’d been with the group all along.
Dr. Miller has since left Southwestern and gone to Beeson Divinity School. I caught up with him again when he was a co-keynote speaker at the Mt. Hermon Christian Writers’ Conference. He agreed to an interview, so we took a four-mile hike through the California redwoods and talked about ministry, relationships, and writing.
Not long into our walk we noticed that many of the massive trees had burn marks from where they’d been struck by lightning, and we wondered how they had survived. The key was their root systems: three or four trees would come together to form one common trunk. Dr. Miller saw a metaphor for community in those roots: “That’s what makes the trees strong,” he said. “Underneath it all, the roots hold hands.”
Here are some other observations he made…
On the family: “Dads have a lot of heartache. I have a theory that dads die five years younger than moms. They long for affirmation and love. Mom gets it from the kids. But often a man gets no love or affection from his wife, from his kids, or from his boss.”
Dr. Miller leans toward mutual submission but appreciates that “Margaret Thatcher was a great leader who still carried a purse.” She held a position of great authority, but she still found a way to express her femininity in it.
On his own family: “I get upset that [one of my children] doesn’t manage money better, but then on my way home from a speaking engagement, I spend the entire honorarium on plants. It bothers me most to see in them what is weak in me.”
Dr. Miller has been fairly open about the fact that he was not head-over-heels in love on his wedding day, but he married Barb because he had asked her—so in a sense, out of honor. The intense feeling of being “in love” came sometime later, a phenomenon he describes in a poem that appears in A Covenant for All Seasons. I wondered how this admission made Barb feel. His answer: “I have discussed it with Barb a lot. Many people probably feel that way on their wedding day. It’s a common experience. It’s her favorite poem. Wasn’t it Richard Lovelace who said, ‘…I could not love thee, Dear, so much/ Loved I not Honour more…’? Promises and integrity are more important than romance.”
On Writing. “Jesus loves nouns and verbs. How do we know? John 3:16 has twenty-eight words, twenty-four mono-syllables, four adjectives. It does not say, ‘For God so loved the perishing, desperate world…’ In a burning building, people don’t yell adjectives.”
Favorite authors and works: Jane Austen; Chilean poet Pablo Neruda; Isabela Allende, The House of the Spirits; Jose Saramago’s Blindness, which won the Nobel. “I’m currently reading Catholic monk Raniero Cantalamessa’s five works of poetry.”
Who sharpens him as a writer: “The Christostem society…Yancey, Owens.” (Miller is a member of the Chrysostom Society, an exclusive circle of Christian writers including Phillip Yancey, Luci Shaw, Madeleine L’Engle, Virginia Stem Owens, Richard Foster and others who convene once a year to celebrate faith and creativity.) “I wish they liked me as much as I like them.”
On crossing over from the Christian market to the ABA: “I had an agent, and three bids came in, one of which was from Schuster. I didn’t go after the secular market; it came to me. But crossing over is a goal I’d really like to accomplish. You can’t get too edgy in the CBA. You can’t have cussing even when quoting, of all people, Martin Luther.”
On the industry trend toward branding (advising writers to limit themselves to one genre so they can create a solid following): “Consider C. S. Lewis. He wrote both non-fiction and fiction, but his works are classics. Narnia. The Great Divorce. If you tell stories over and over after a while, it all starts to sound the same. Madeleine L’Engle talks of asking her friend, a prolific novelist, ‘What are you titling it this time?’ That’s what’s wrong with some [writing] conferences. People long to be called a ‘novelist,’ rather than longing to write.”