The Reverend Cecil Williams is a local hero in San Francisco. His
church,Glide Memorial, is an urban refuge for the spiritually
disenfranchised of every race, class, and sexuality. Here's a taste of
what San Franciscans can't get enough of: a faith steeped more in heart
and soul than in scripture.
pt: How did Glide Memorial get its start, and how do you explain
its popularity?
cw: When I came to Glide, about 30 years ago, there were about 35
people, all white, middle class, and very, very anti-anything occurring,
any changes taking place. They didn't even want poor white people in the
church.
pt: How did you react?
cw: Well, the third Sunday I was there I decided I was going to do
something drastic, traumatic. I just pulled off my black robe and said,
"I will not wear a black robe again until the church becomes alive." So I
did something you don't do in a church: I stepped across the altar, with
the Bible and all the candles and the cross, and started preaching in the
aisle. And the folks got up and left.
pt: Interesting beginning.
cw: Very interesting beginning. So the next Sunday, I just walked
over to the door, stood there, and started preaching. They had to pass by
me if they were going to get out, and they stayed. It was horrible, just
horrible.
But in three months, I brought in a jazz group on Christmas Day,
and immediately I said, This is it. John Handy and his jazz routine were
playing the organ: "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." The place was crowded--jam
packed. And that was it.
pt: Explain the appeal of jazz.
cw: I'm a folk preacher. A folk therapist. A folk musician. I come
from authentically that which is of my experience. Therefore, the music
is strictly from the soul, strictly improvisational.
So, it's always new. When the musician starts improvising, he never
can go back to what he did last Sunday. That's what's frightening to a
lot of people who can't let themselves go. But it's also very
invigorating and very releasing because it opens you up to be
yourself.
pt: There's tremendous vitality in your services. Is it the music
that lets that in?
cw: The music certainly plays a major role. You can be free enough
to comfort each other, to touch each other, to embrace each other, to
engage each other, to not be afraid of each other. The music certainly
has that very strong element.
Go back to folk songs, gospel, jazz, and spirituals. See, all of
that came out of tremendous pain and hurt, rejection, loss, alienation,
and abandonment. What I'm doing is I'm expressing my pain and hope at the
same time.
pt: Do you consider the church Pentecostal?
cw: We have those characteristics, but they come from me, from my
own experience. I don't go and study other folks. I come from where I
came from, as a kid, in the little black church I grew up in. And some of
the things they did I rejected, because I could see that it was a
manipulation and an exaggeration. My struggle is never to fool folks; to
keep it authentic--who we are and who we are becoming--rather than to
mimic or to translate what others do into my own terms.
I'm not interested in being an intellectual or in being
traditional, conventional. I'm not interested in having great wisdom. I'm
not interested in those facets of the evangelical movement. I don't have
to get stuff from them.
I got my own stuff. If it hits you, okay. That's why I've got so
many different races, classes, and such a mixture of theologies and
philosophies at Glide. I've got agnostics, atheists, Buddhists,
Christians, Jews, Muslims the whole spectrum.
pt: You say you draw a lot of what you know from personal pain and
personal loss. Is that something you can talk about?
cw: Sure. First of all, I was the fifth child in a family of six,
five boys and one girl. Bless that poor girl. We were very poor; it was
the 30s. We survived off of the food and the little work that my father
could get working on the roads or whatever the WPA provided. We were
always in line to get food.
The survival of our family really depended on the survival of the
other black families in that community. We had that village aspect about
us, that African sense about us. We always shared what we had with each
other. We were able to make it because there was really a total family, a
village.
pt: A community.
cw: That's critical to me, the community. When I was 12 years old,
I had a mental breakdown; I went berserk for a long time. I felt
rejection from the white community. Couldn't understand why the
pigmentation of my skin kept me from doing. Everybody always told me
"You're going to be something." And of course, I began to raise questions
about why it is that white folks treat us the way they do.
The breakdown was very vivid. I just all of a sudden felt like I
had been overcome by a train.
pt: What did they call it in those days?
cw: They didn't say I was crazy. We had one physician, he was
black, and he just said, "Your son needs rest."
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