Losing My Religion: A Memoir of Faith and Finding by William C. Mills

Abstract

Reviewed by: Losing My Religion: A Memoir of Faith and Finding by William C. Mills Michael Plekon William C. Mills. Losing My Religion: A Memoir of Faith and Finding. Eugene, OR: RESOURCE Publications, 2019. xv + 151 pp. Some would say Augustine (of Hippo) started it all off with his Confessions, but the genre of spiritual memoirs has a new and worthy addition in this account of growing up, education, and service in ordained ministry from William C. Mills. Some of the most powerful works in memoir include those of Richard Holloway, Barbara Brown Taylor, Darcey Steinke, Kate Braestrup, and Sara Miles, among others. Mills’s account deserves to be in this procession and the ingredients he brings, not always found in others, include a subtle sense of humor, unembarrassed self-honesty, and generous humanity. Purely as an aside, other than a few chapters of mine that I have placed in recent publications, I do not know of other Eastern Church priests who have shared their personal journeys. As Patricia Hampl observes about memoir writing, there are so many challenges in remembering. Do others recall the event or setting as you do? And if not, is your recall accurate? How much do you tell of the more gory details of “family of origin” behavior, especially how your parents really treated you, not to mention what you faced in school. And, what of the dense, often toxic, sometimes uproariously funny and wonderful swirl of people thrown together in a parish community—in particular how they treated you as their pastor, as well as vice versa. Barbara Brown Taylor captured something of such a stew of humanity in her memoir, Leaving Church. The same has been done by Mills here, with honesty and most especially humor. With him, we encounter the swirl of souls that constitute Nativity of the Holy Virgin parish. It’s really a goulash, but there’s much grace in it. Will Willimon and Walter Brueggemann, no less, among others, have found his narrative true and reassuring. So too colleagues of mine in ministry. They praise it as moving, even painful, and real over and against their own experiences of family, education, and pastoral service. There is no doubt that Mills could have said a lot more. Having tried to draw upon my own family, formation, and parish experience several times in my writing, I know the challenge of being faithful to the truth while at the same time recognizing the need to protect individuals, especially when the full story cannot be told, not just for candor’s sake but for respect of privacy. That said, one cannot escape the deft mix of narrative and symbolism Mills employs. I think, in particular, of his describing how the clerical cassock is a garment but also the start of taking on a new identity, akin to the monastic’s reception of the habit. He continues this with the various items that comprise a priest’s vestments for celebration of the liturgy. And, toward the end of his account, there is a subtle but beautiful and powerful invocation of the meanings of water and baptism, death and new life. Full disclosure requires I say that I have known William Mills for over twenty years, first as a parish intern, and later on as a student informally, and colleague and, yes, friend. Our history does not preclude my [End Page 107] reviewing his fine work of memoir. Over the years, memoir has been a common interest and we have exchanged some of those each of us discovered and found to be of quality. What is significant to me are the consequences of someone in ordained ministry sharing the human costs, disappointments, joys, fascinations, as well as sorrow of this life of service. All too often, clergy can be thought of and discussed only in stereotypic terms. The collar or vestments or titles end up constructing a kind of wall around the person who is a pastor, forcing a personality into a mold that is really a captivity—assuming all clergy are pious fools or underhanded lowlifes. Great writers like Graham Greene have been able to allow the humanity of a priest to show, with...