Presbyterian Poet Takes Time for Connectionsby Ray Waddle
He can thank his Presbyterian roots for the kind of writer and Christian he is, a man trying to be mindful of time, the present moment, in a 24/7 hurried world. “Religious revelation, in our culture, means give it to me quick, like a fast food hamburger,” he says. “But Jesus said, No, let me tell it to you in a story, a parable, a revelation that gradually unfolds. I think of Jesus’ incarnation as not just flesh but the manifestation of a story, the official final chapter in the great divine story.” Mills, 33, grew up the son of Presbyterian agricultural missionaries, Wilmer and Betsy Mills, who were assigned to rural Brazil. He lived there as a boy, from 1972-80. The place marked him for life. It gave him a love of farm land, a knack for woodwork, a respect for religious discipleship, as well as a bout of serious illness (malaria twice, and a near-fatal round of rheumatic fever). Not least, Third World farm life gave him a slowed-down sense of time — a theology of time — that nourishes his poetry and his view of the world. “There was no concept of clock time,” he recalls. “Nothing was ‘on time.’ Buses were eight hours late.” He grew up watching Brazilian farmers plant rice painstakingly by hand. They took their time, respecting the laborious time-honored traditions of harvesting, never skipping the many steps between cleaning, drying, threshing. It was a revelation to young Mills, this respect for traditional ways. It gave new meaning to the Psalm’s declaration, “Be still and know that I am God.” “Brazil put me in a state of mind that is fundamentally at odds with this culture,” he says. “It oriented my brain to think of things as a sequence of steps, none of which can be skipped. Yet our culture is dedicated to skipping steps, combining them, reducing them, getting it done quicker. But I discovered that living a life where the steps aren’t skipped is like telling a story. If you remove the steps or cut them back, you remove the ability to make connections — even the ability to tell good stories, or hear them.” Mills and his family moved back to the United States in the early 1980s. He graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, where he discovered writing as a vocation. The lessons of Brazil echo through his poetry. Mills is considered a “narrative” poet who strives to tell stories in disciplined, often rhymed forms, without resorting to the confessional tone of currentday free-verse poetry. Mills says he tries to tell stories that refer to Christ and testify to the presence of God in a “backdoor sort of way.” “If I was beating all my characters over the head with religion, they wouldn’t be good poems,” he says. This son of missionaries, husband and the father of two (age 2 and 4) is determined to find out what the gift of time has in store for his art: Several poems in Light for the Orphans are character sketches that will appear in much longer narrative poems later on, he says. How much later? “Maybe 20 years from now,” he says. All in good time. (Ray Waddle, a writer based in Nashville, was Tennessean religion editor from 1984-2001.)
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To
Wilmer Mills, religious faith and good poetry have something in common:
They are stories that unfold at their own pace, in the fullness of time:
They’re not fast food to be consumed in haste. Mills, a young
family man and carpenter in Sewanee, Tenn., is a rising poet on the
national scene, with a new collection of poems called 
Light
for the Orphans
