Remembering Calvin
Ifirst heard of Calvin Miller when my girlfriend, Pam, loaned me a copy of his book,The Philippian Fragment. Dr. Miller soonbecame one of my favorite writers.
Once when someone asked if I couldhave dinner with any three people, I included him on my list. Not long afterthat, I suffered a miscarriage and was feeling like God was silent. But whilesitting in the office of my writing mentor at Dallas Seminary (DTS) oneafternoon, Dr. Reg Grant asked me if I would like to join him for a lunch inFort Worth with Calvin Miller. I dropped my pen and my jaw. It was one of thoseGod 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 withhim?”
Dr.Miller had left the pastorate to become writer-in-residence at SouthwesternBaptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS), and unknown to me, he co-taught several classeswith Reg. That day I met “Calvin” and his wife, “Barb,” who served as hisadministrative 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,” hesaid. When he returned to us, he explained that life is short and they alwaysparted with affection so if anything happened, their last exchange with eachother would be loving.
A few months after that wonderful lunch, Calvinarranged 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. Atthe last minute a student who had failed to pay in advance showed up expectingto get in, and Calvin graciously (and discreetly—I doubt that student everrealized 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 everyonethe whole time.
Calvin later moved from Southwesternand went to Beeson Divinity School. I caught up with him again when he was a co-keynotespeaker at the Mt. Hermon Christian Writers’ Conference a few years back. He agreedto an interview, so we took a four-mile hike through the California redwoods andtalked about ministry, relationships, and writing.
Not long into our walk we noticed that manyof the massive trees had burn marks from where lightning had struck them, andwe wondered how they survived. The key, we decided, was their root systems. Threeor four trees came together to form one common trunk. And Calvin saw in thoseroots 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 hemade:
On the family: “Dads have a lotof heartache. I have a theory that dads die five years younger than moms. Theylong for affirmation and love. Mom gets it from the kids. But often a man getsno love or affection from his wife, from his kids, or from his boss.”
On marriage: “I lean towardmutual submission, but I appreciate that Margaret Thatcher was a great leaderwho 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 aspeaking engagement, I spend the entire honorarium on plants. It bothers memost to see in them what is weak in me.”
On love: InCalvin’s writings and in person with some of our writing students at DTS, he wasopen 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 intensefeeling of being “in love” came sometime later, a phenomenon he described in apoem that appeared in A Covenant for AllSeasons. I wondered how this admission made his wife feel. His answer: “Ihave discussed it with Barb a lot. Many people probably feel that way on theirwedding day. It’s a common experience. It’s her favorite poem. Wasn’t itRichard Loveless who said, ‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much/ Loved I notHonour more…’? Promises and integrity aremore important than romance.”
On writing. “Jesus lovesnouns 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, desperateworld…’ In a burning building, people don’t yell adjectives.”
His favorite authorsand 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 sharpenedhim as a writer:“The Christostem society…Yancey, Owens.” (Calvin was amember of the Chrysostom Society, an exclusive circle of Christian writers thatincluded Phillip Yancey, Luci Shaw, Madeleine L’Engle, Virginia Stem Owens,Richard Foster and others who convened once a year to celebrate faith andcreativity.)“I wish they liked me as much as I like them.”
On crossing overfrom 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 cameto me.” But crossing over was a goal he really wanted to accomplish. “You can’tget too edgy in the CBA. You can’t have cussing, even when quoting, of allpeople, Martin Luther.”
Calvin Miller wrote fiction, nonfiction, devotional, leadership,children’s picture books, poetry, specialty Bibles, Bible study guides and manybooks on the deeper life, so I asked him his thoughts on the industry trendtoward branding (advising writers to limit themselves to one genre so they can createa solid following). His response: “Consider C. S. Lewis. He wrote bothnon-fiction and fiction, but his works are classics. Narnia. The Great Divorce. Ifyou 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 titlingit this time?’ That’s what’s wrong with some [writing] conferences. People long to be called a ‘novelist,’ ratherthan longing to write.”
* * *
I was sad to learn that Calvin Miller passedaway Sunday in Birmingham, ten days after heartsurgery, as a result of complications. He would have been seventy-six nextweek.
The author of more than ahundred titles, Dr. Miller was best known for The Singer Trilogy (IVP) that sold amillion 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 the recently released Lettersto 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 andartist. He looked with the eyes of an artist, sensitive to story, beauty, andhuman empathy; then he wove it all together in a message of deep Christianhope.”
It’s true. He was all of that.But I will remember Calvin most as the person through whom God’s love brokethrough, 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.