Remembering Calvin Miller
I first heard of Calvin Miller when my girlfriend, Pam, loaned me a copy of his book, The Philippian Fragment.
Dr. Miller soon became one of my favorite writers.
Once when someone asked if I could have dinner with any three people, I included him on my list. Not long after that, I suffered a miscarriage and was feeling like God was silent. But while sitting in the office of my writing mentor at Dallas Seminary (DTS) one afternoon, Dr. Reg Grant asked me if I would like to join him for a lunch in Fort Worth with Calvin Miller. I dropped my pen and my jaw. It was one of those God moments when the silence ended and love broke through. “You know CalvinMiller?” I asked. “He lives near Dallas? And you’re inviting me to lunch with him?”
Dr. Miller had left the pastorate to become writer-in-residence at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS), and unknown to me, he co-taught several classes with Reg. That day I met “Calvin” and his wife, “Barb,” who served as his administrative assistant. When Reg and I stepped into the hall with him on ourway to lunch, Calvin stopped short. “I forgot to tell Barb I love her,” he said. When he returned to us, he explained that life is short and they always parted with affection so if anything happened, their last exchange with each other would be loving.
A few months after that wonderful lunch, Calvin arranged for a group of DTS students to join some SWBTS students for dinner athis and Barb’s home in Fort Worth, followed by a night at the theater seeing Les Misérables.
What stood out to me most that nightwas not the great performance, terrific as it was. It was something Calvin did. At the last minute a student who had failed to pay in advance showed up expecting to get in, and Calvin graciously (and discreetly—I doubt that student ever realized it) gave up his own near-the-front seat and bought himself a ticket for one of the few remaining seats in the upper-balcony stratosphere. When the group gathered atthe end, Calvin quietly slipped downstairs to join us as if he’d been with everyone the whole time.
Calvin later moved from Southwestern and went to Beeson Divinity School. I caught up with him again when he was a co-keynote speaker at the Mt. Hermon Christian Writers’ Conference a few years back. 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 lightning had struck them, and we wondered how they survived. The key, we decided, was their root systems. Three or four trees came together to form one common trunk. And Calvin saw in those roots a metaphor for community: “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 lotof 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.”
On marriage:
“I lean toward mutual submission, but I appreciate that Margaret Thatcher was a great leader who still carried a purse.” He went on to explain that she held a position ofgreat authority, but she still found a way to express her femininity in it.
On one of his weaknesses:
“I get upset that [oneof 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.”
On love:
In Calvin’s writings and in person with some of our writing students at DTS, he was 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 described in a poem that appeared in
A Covenant for All Seasons. I wondered how this admission made his wife 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 Loveless 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.”
His favorite authors and works:
JaneAusten; Chilean poet PabloNeruda; Isabela Allende, TheHouse of the Spirits; Jose Saramago’s Blindness, which won the Nobel. At the time of our conversation he was readingCatholic monk Raniero Cantalamessa’s five works of poetry.
On who sharpened him as a writer:
“The Christostem society…Yancey, Owens.” (Calvin was amember of the Chrysostom Society, an exclusive circle of Christian writers that included Phillip Yancey, Luci Shaw, Madeleine L’Engle, Virginia Stem Owens, Richard Foster and others who convened 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 was a goal he really wanted to accomplish. “You can’t get too edgy in the CBA. You can’t have cussing, even when quoting, of all people, Martin Luther.”
Calvin Miller wrote fiction, nonfiction, devotional, leadership, children’s picture books, poetry, specialty Bibles, Bible study guides and many books on the deeper life, so I asked him his thoughts on the industry trend toward branding (advising writers to limit themselves to one genre so they can createa solid following). His response: “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. MadeleineL’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.”
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I was sad to learn that Calvin Miller passed away Sunday in Birmingham, ten days after heart surgery, as a result of complications. He would have been seventy-six next week. The author of more than a hundred titles, Dr. Miller was best known for The Singer Trilogy (IVP) that sold a million copies in the late 1970s (and still sells today). He also wrote The Book of Jesus (Simon& Schuster), Into theDepths of God (Bethany),The Empowered Leader (B&H), and Letters to Heaven (Worthy). His memoir, Lifeis Mostly Edges (Thomas Nelson) released four years ago.
In the words of Philip Yancey, “As a writer, Calvin Miller offered that rare combination of preacher and artist. He looked with the eyes of an artist, sensitive to story, beauty, and human empathy; then he wove it all together in a message of deep Christian hope.” It’s true. He was all of that. But I will remember Calvin most as the person through whom God’s love broke through, the guy who would rather spend sixty dollars than embarrass a student, and the husband who stopped in his tracks to run back and kiss his wife goodbye.