Community matters
On the sermons of Tyrone Williams

Six months after Tyrone Williams died from cancer at age seventy on March 11, 2024, I accessed the texts of seventeen sermons he had composed and that were now housed in the “Theological, 2001-2021” section of his archive at SUNY Buffalo. A lay preacher, as well as the distinguished poet, critic, and English professor I had known him to be, Tyrone had delivered the sermons at the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he worshipped from 1987, when he began teaching full time at Xavier, until he took his position as a distinguished chair in the English Department at Buffalo in Spring 2022. Among the sermons is “Blood is Thicker than Water.” It has been a bittersweet experience to read because it addresses the significance of an esteemed individual’s trace in language as a figure of inspiration to those who survive in his absence.
The Holy Spirit is the Word of God which outlives the human body. As long as Jesus remained with his disciples in his human flesh, they didn’t need the Counselor to move them to spread the gospel. But once the human body of Jesus was no longer alive in this world, his words remained with them. But not just with them.
Needless to say, I do not plan to argue that Tyrone was some kind of savior! As comments in his sermons indicate, Tyrone regarded himself as a flawed person, all too human. He casts himself as a man with pains, worldly desires, discomforts, and complaints. He laments that he is often more involved with staying in his “comfort zone” than with attending to the needs of others. At the same time, his sermons reveal him to have been a spiritual seeker more concerned with the fate of his soul than with satisfying the pleasures of the body. He sought meaning, comfort, and a sense of place through his long association with Winton, and especially through his close friendship with the pastor, Kathy Callahan Howell, and her family. He finds in scripture a call to service as well as a message of transcendence. There is a yearning for knowledge of the ineffable.
Given the resonance between the subject matter and my reception of it six months after Tyrone’s death, reading “Blood is Thicker than Water” affected me on an emotional level. At the same time, as a literary critic intending these remarks for readers who knew Tyrone, as did I, as a scholar and poet, I noticed how this sermon is influenced by his graduate training in poststructuralist thought at Wayne State, as well as his affiliation with the Language Poetry movement. In his poetry, Tyrone does not deny embodied experience, but he understands writing in the Derridean sense: all language communications — whether speech acts or what we usually think of as written discourse — are understood as absence-based examples of écriture. Just so, in “Blood is Thicker than Water,” Tyrone emphasizes the significance of language to transmit meaning in the absence of the person who has uttered the “good news.”[1] The archetypal figure of the bitter logician of language, Jesus Christ regards language as a medium in which authorial presence is unnecessary: “As long as Jesus remained with his disciples in his human flesh, they didn’t need the Counselor to move them to spread the gospel. But once the human body of Jesus was no longer alive in this world, his words remained with them.”
Just as he contested the link between flesh and word in his discussion of Jesus’ significance after he was “no longer alive in this world,” Tyrone detaches biological affiliation from church membership when he interrogates the common phrase, “blood is thicker than water,” which Tyrone notes is not biblical, but originates from a German folk tale that is about one thousand years old. Tyrone does not ignore the significance of “blood” — the association of biological lineage with family or tribe — but his close reading of scripture enables him to recognize how Jesus’ radical ideas of fellowship as chosen, not predicted at birth, challenge, rather than support, the cliché. Later in the sermon, Tyrone emphasizes the paradoxical nature of scripture in comments on the Parable of the Talents. He notices that Jesus’ significance is contingent upon his absence but stresses the value of living messengers of the word; those who, unlike the servant who possesses talents but buries them in the sand instead of sharing them as his master had urged, pass on the good news. Jesus, of course, has become the Word.
Comparable to his poetry, Tyrone’s sermons express his recognition that irony and paradox are essential dimensions of the human condition. Perhaps this is one reason he was drawn to Jesus’ teachings, filled as they are with enigmas and figurative approaches to language that even befuddle his apostles:
When Jesus himself violates the law of Sabbath, he does so out of love. His love, the love we are to follow and imitate, is a love of reaching out to others. It is a love filled with compassion. In other words, it is a love that is, or should be, exactly like our faith, reaching out to others.
In my presence, Tyrone radiated the qualities of love and compassion that characterize Jesus’ teachings. At the same time, contrary to the message of his sermon, Tyrone was not one to preach to the unconverted. He did not proselytize. His close friend in Cincinnati, the social worker and poet Pat Clifford, who collaborated with Tyrone on Washpark (2021), a hybrid book of poems, social commentary, and photographs, and who helped arrange the Buffalo archives in the wake of Tyrone’s passing, told me about the same thing in an email message:
Tyrone was a long-time member of the Winton Community Free Methodist Church. He was very close friends with Kathy Howell, the pastor there, and her family. They were the family who hosted the home hospice during his last weeks. I knew of the connection but didn’t realize the extent of it until that final month. I think the church community (and his Detroit family, for that matter) kind of felt the same way. Each sphere seemed somewhat separate, socially. You can talk to Kathy for more detail, but the way she described it Tyrone would be asked to give the sermon from time to time when she was unavailable.
A paradox. On the one hand, Tyrone’s deep tie to Winton was unknown to me prior to his passing. On the other hand, as my reading of the sermons he delivered indicates, Tyrone’s background in literary studies and postmodern poetics influenced his approach to composing orations as a lay preacher.
By crossing the boundary between literary studies and religious teachings in the sermons, I refer to Tyrone’s interpretation of scripture from a rhetorical point of view. His wide learning and capacious reading habits, both in world religious texts and in secular cultures, contribute to his treatment of the Gospels and Letters that underpin Christian theology. His readings are radical in the sense that they go to the root of Christianity. The focus is on what Jesus is quoted as saying and what he is shown as doing in the Gospels, as well as on how Paul followed conventions, such as formal salutations, when composing his letters to communities such as the Galatians and the Corinthians. Tyrone does not give short shrift to Jesus’ fundamental message of love, caring, faith, and the value of sharing the message of the good news that the spirit endures beyond the human body, but he unpacks Jesus’ message by attending to figurative language and idiosyncratic behaviors.[2]
In “Blood is Thicker than Water,” Tyrone regards the value of personhood as a linguistic construct that is related to but distinct from the autobiographical dimensions of selfhood. In “But End With Love,” however, he fashions a persona that relies on memories from his childhood in Detroit, and he also discusses how he revised his response to student writing early in his career as a graduate instructor at Wayne State. Recalling what he refers to as the “tough love” that his parents bestowed upon him through corporal punishment, “Wait until your father comes home” became a traumatic mantra uttered by his mother, but one that Tyrone regards as a legitimate sign of disciplined parenting. Not himself a parent, but, as he explains in his sermons, a caring uncle to his sister’s children, a Big Brother-type mentor, a classroom teacher, Tyrone possessed a gentle soul, but he supports a traditional version of parenting because, as he says in “But End With Love,” the goal of an elder is not to be liked, but to administer love. In Tyrone’s writings, the term “father” is doubled because it refers to the male biological parent, but also, as in “My Father’s Business,” the Holy Father. Tyrone reminds his fellow congregants that all of us, parent and child, teacher and student, are, in a metaphorical sense, undertaking the good work of sharing knowledge and experience in the context of a “business” that we humans do not own, and that is engaged in an endeavor we may not fully comprehend.
In “But End With Love,” Tyrone offers a second anecdote that suggests how, as a young man, he adjusted his approach to educating undeveloped minds in a manner that tempered his parents’ hardnosed example. As a novice teacher, he adopted his parents’ “tough love” approach by selecting a red pen to criticize student writing, but then a more seasoned colleague encouraged him to conclude his remarks with a positive comment, even when addressing a student composition of poor quality. Be tough, but be kind. Sincerity matters, but so does tact. Interested in the indelible relationship between form and content, Tyrone puts his personal reflections and pedagogical practices in the service of reading Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Paul laments how the Corinthians misbehave, but, as Tyrone learned to do as a composition teacher early in his career, the apostle ends his remarks with a salutation that doubles as a shot of love: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” In his analysis of the relationship between convention and sincerity in Paul’s letter, he acknowledges that the line between artifice and immediacy may not be so easily drawn.
Compared to his poetry, which does not exclude personal information, but which avoids doing so in a straightforward manner, Tyrone’s sermons situate his readings of scripture in a direct relationship to his personal story. Part of Tyrone’s rhetorical strategy in the sermons is based on his sensitivity to audience and to the context of his address. Writing sermons as a fellow congregant of lay believers at Winton, he is keenly aware that he is not delivering a paper at the MLA! But Tyrone’s method of combining personal reflections with biblical teachings tells us something else about how he interprets scripture. Prompting personal memories, scripture helps Tyrone to bring shape — a meaningful template, or prooftext — to experiences that might otherwise have become forgotten or that would have remained in his psyche as unprocessed flotsam and jetsam. Reading scripture, in other words, is not, as in New Critical interpretative approaches, understood to be an objective procedure in which the subject position of the reader is excluded from the textual transaction. Instead, the reader’s relationship to the text is foregrounded, and the Word is made alive. A moving example of Tyrone’s subjective, and reader-friendly, reception strategy occurs in the opening passage of “To Live In Tents”:
It was almost exactly nine years ago this past week that I took my only City Cure bike trip to Niagara Falls, not as a biker but as the driver of the water truck. It seemed odd but appropriate that I was driving this big truck since my father has been a trucker for the past thirty years or so. It was the one time that I was able to imagine what driving a truck must be like for him even though, unlike him and his long-distance drives, I was stopping every few hours to provide water for the bikers.
As in “But End With Love,” which alludes to “tough love” parenting, this sermon recalls his working-class roots in Detroit by remembering his father’s vocation.[3] As in “My Father’s Business,” which begins, “I am not a parent,” but goes on to explain how he attempts, however imperfectly, to imagine his way into the unspeakable pain of child loss, Tyrone imaginatively enters into the experience of someone else — in this case his father — by reflecting on his own brief stint as the driver of a water truck. We learn of Tyrone’s involvement with City Cure, a program supported by Cincinnati’s century-old City Gospel Mission, which provides Summer Camp experiences to young people, as well as a host of social, financial, educational, and recreational services for vulnerable members of the Cincinnati community. In Pauline fashion, however, Tyrone leads with his vulnerabilities; he is not much of a camper, doesn’t enjoy being away from creature comforts, and isn’t a fan of “sleeping on the ground and using public shower facilities.” Self-mocking, he remembers dreaming during the uncomfortable trip of “reap[ing] the rewards for hav[ing] suffered through a couple of nights sleeping on the wet ground in a damp tent.” In spite of the limited nature of his “roughing it” experience, Tyrone activates his empathetic imagination. Extrapolating from his short stretch as a nomad, he crafts a social justice message about the life of diasporic persons who may live for long periods in tents “because of wars or political divisions and strife.” After reminding fellow congregants that those of us “with homes, with jobs, with beds to sleep on, with houses and apartments to live in” are “indeed blessed,” he turns to Abraham and Sarah’s uncomfortable existence as desert wanderers who live in a tent. Counterintuitively, he argues that our comfortable lives in air-conditioned modern dwellings may stymie our spiritual development: “Because we don’t have to live like Abraham, we often have neither the depths of his doubts nor the heights of his faith.” Tyrone offers a literal reading of dwelling in the case of Abraham and Sarah, but he switches to a figurative approach when describing Jesus’ appearance in embodied form as a kind of nomadism. Metaphorically, Jesus is a migrant “because God decided to step out of his heavenly house and live in the tent of a human body.” Alluding to his experience in a tent on the trip to Niagara Falls, he notes, “As wet and as messy as the body is, Jesus, nonetheless, endured it for our sakes.” Extending the metaphorical relationship between his brief job as driver of the water truck, Tyrone, making use of the earthy humor one finds in speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., as when in his “I Have a Dream” address he pursues the extended metaphor of America bouncing the check of foundational Civil Rights when it comes to African Americans, states: “And he made his church our water truck, always just a little ahead of us but never too far for us to catch up to.”
Later in the sermon, Tyrone displays his close reading skills and complex approach to exegesis by defamiliarizing Jesus’ declaration, “In my father’s house there are many mansions.” Turning a figurative image of heaven as “a house full of mansions” into a literal one, Tyrone complicates our thinking about the meaning of dwelling, in this world or the next. Recognizing that God is imagined as living in a “house,” while the rest of us desire heavenly “mansions,” Tyrone develops a pointed critique of a consumer society. He laments our tendency to literally and figuratively buy into a late capitalist economic system that functions by creating the desire for endless consumption through advertisements that declare our possessions to be insufficient to bring peace of mind. “We often turn the blessings of nice and comfortable homes into the curse of mere tents.” He compares our hamster-on-a-wheel-like consumerism, which suggests that we have the power to control our fate through hard work that will allow us to purchase happiness, to the story of Abraham and Sarah, who rely on faith in God’s promise of fulfillment to endure their nomadism so “their children and children’s children were to reap the rewards of their faithfulness.”
In his reading of Jesus’ enigmatic phrase, “In my father’s house there are many mansions,” Tyrone notes that Jesus may seem to endorse the consumerism that the rest of his sermon is critiquing. Who would not want to live in a mansion contained in God’s house? God doesn’t get to live in a mansion, but we lowly humans do. What gives? Tyrone’s response is that because Jesus knows humans are, as Madonna pointed out in a hit song, “living in a material world,” he must put enticing imagery in the service of imagining the ineffable: “Jesus understands that we can only understand ‘reward’ in material terms and so he uses ‘mansion’ to demonstrate the grandeur of what awaits the faithful.” Like Tyrone the young instructor at Wayne State who massages his critique with words of praise, and Paul, who tactfully combines criticism with a shot of love in his salutation to the Corinthians, Jesus selects rhetoric that is appropriate to his audience. He meets his disciples where they are in order to nudge them in the direction where he wants them to be. On first glance, it appears as if Jesus is enforcing, rather than critiquing materialism, but Tyrone cleverly notes that God is perfectly content to live in a “house.” Inside God’s plain “house,” however, we discover multitudes of splendor. Externals, Tyrone reminds us, are not what Jesus’ message is focused on; like language, like metaphor, like parables, they are the vehicles, but faith, eternity, and love are the tenors. Home is truly where the heart is in Tyrone’s sermons.
As was the case with “Blood is Thicker than Water,” Tyrone’s reading of Paul’s letter is a compelling document to read for those of us who knew Tyrone, but did not know this side of him. They reveal much about his values, some of which may surprise readers who only knew Tyrone the poet, professor, and critic. I say this because Tyrone’s poetry and criticism focus on the complex relationships between language and identity with a special emphasis on what Tyrone, in a review of Taylor Brady’s Yesterday’s News, regards as “an argument between a poetics and the culture from which that poetics derives”:[4]
“Yesterday’s News” takes up the argument between poetics and cultural studies, yoking together political science, ecology, union activity, civic responsibility, etc. even as it contemplates traditional poetics concerns (e.g., the role of the poet and poetry in a society, the question of poetic immortality, etc.).[5]
As noted, Tyrone’s sermons do rely on personal history to inform his readings of scripture, but the vexed issue of how personal identity may be shaped by social, political, and economic forces goes largely unaddressed. In the sermons, Tyrone privileges respecting authority in hierarchical relationships over encouraging persons in subordinate positions to challenge decisions made by those who hold the power to enforce doctrine.
In “Law, Love, and Grace,” Tyrone takes a position that, at least at first glance, chafes against his views on socio-political themes in his secular writings, such as his review of Taylor Brady’s Yesterday’s News. After addressing the topic of “fruits of the spirit,” which encourages Christians to be compassionate, gentle, and forgiving of others because we are all sinners who are absolved by the grace of God, Tyrone turns to Paul’s controversial letter to the Ephesians in which the apostle states that “wives must submit to their husbands” and “slaves must submit to their masters.” Acknowledging that Paul’s comments were “routinely invoked as biblical justifications for the institutions of slavery in Europe and in the Americas from the 16th century to the late 19th century,” Tyrone situates the abominable remarks in the context of other, far less objectionable, commentaries in the epistle that focus on “self-control, especially regarding the body and its sensations and appetites.”[6] Paul here is less concerned with the submission of the other to the self than with the submission of the self to self-imposed strictures that benefit the community by curbing — even, in his term, disciplining — the human appetite for “drunkenness and bawdy behavior” through “self-control.” Relying on contextualism, a strategy familiar to literary critics, he extracts an abstract meaning from Paul’s concrete examples of submissive relationships by regarding them as figurative expressions of the noble virtues of Christian warriors:
[Christian warriors] are mobilized in order to be sacrificed for causes greater than ‘mere’ life. And the motifs of sacrifice and war that frame this chapter help explain Paul’s emphasis on submission to the prevailing social and cultural orders, however unjust and unfair … And since this war is being waged on the field of eternity, the stakes are immeasurably high.
As I will demonstrate below, Tyrone wrote insightful essays on the relationships between cultural movements such as the New Criticism and the rise of the Liberal Arts in American higher education and political movements involving Civil Rights and the Communist Party of America, as his nuanced analysis of the work of Harold Cruse, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison displays. In his sermon, Tyrone does not ignore issues relating to what he calls the “prevailing social and cultural orders, however unjust and unfair,” but he is engaged with terms such as “war,” “sacrifice,” and “submission” in the overall context of Paul’s message, which recommends the release from “individual desire” to promote community responsibility and familial harmony. The moral point that I take away from Tyrone’s (for me uncomfortable) defense of Paul’s emphasis on submission is one of “accountability to others” as “the only check and balance we have against our human nature in this world.” He continues: “humility emphasizes the group, not the individual.” Tyrone is commending a virtue — humility. It is a virtue that characterizes his self-representation, as well as how he casts Paul, who often admitted failure. “And as I said before, the group — or army — or family — of Christians was the most important thing to Paul. It should be to us too.” Tyrone continues:
For in submission we give ourselves over to something higher, more encompassing, than our own individual desires. We, as members of a family, as members of a community, are interdependent. We rely on, we need, one another.
Interpreting Paul’s message from the standpoint of liability to community, Tyrone’s homily dovetails with his decentering of individualism and privileging of the common good in his essay on the debate within African American intellectual circles about the relative merits of assimilation/integration versus Black nationalism/separatism. What Tyrone refers to as “group power” is of tantamount importance. His commentary on this theme is characterized by nuance, even ambivalence. As different as the positions of Civil Rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X are, Tyrone’s fundamental concern is for what he refers to as “the development and aspirations of the black underclass as a group,” rather than privileging the fate of the individual person:
For King and his followers, group power was a strategic resource; once Negroes were granted full citizenship rights they would no longer need to wield power as a group. For Stokely Carmichael and the members of SNCC, however, the course of American history suggested that group power would remain a permanent, necessary resource.[7]
Tyrone’s fascination with Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (1967; 1984), which challenges the integrationist aims of the Civil Rights movement if it intrudes upon Black solidarity, stems from his focus on “group power.” The same is true of Tyrone’s analysis of the vexed relationship between African American intellectuals and authors (such as Ellison and Wright) and the CPUSA (Communist Party of the United States): ”From the point of view of the CPUSA, ‘identity politics’ is a synonym for ‘false consciousness’ to the extent the interpretations of a specific group’s experiences remain circumscribed by, or confined to, the group,” he writes in “New Criticism and the Civil Rights Movement: Identity Politics and the Liberal Arts.”[8] Supporting communitarian values while contesting the quintessential American ideology of independence and the sanctity of the self, Tyrone excavates the roots of the Liberal Arts tradition in Plato to critique, rather than to promote, a Liberal Arts education:
[To] the extent the liberal arts function as modes of release or relative freedom from labor (itself understood as the struggle for relative freedom from nature), they are intrinsically linked to the birth of a specific type of ‘individual.’ But for Plato, the iconoclast and the individual, as we understand the latter, were essentially synonymous. Thus, poetry and drama were dangerous because they agitated (liberated) men’s emotions from the cages of rationality. For Plato, unleashed emotions always threaten the rule of rationalism, and it isn’t a great leap from this moralized aesthetics to a politicized ethics policing the figure of the iconoclast within the social structures of classical antiquity. Moreover, the usurping of rationalism is never simply a matter of individual pathology. The very existence of a ‘community’ depends on the suppression of (individual and collective) disorder.[9]
In a provocative yoking of two movements that helped define American society after World War II — the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the Liberal Arts curriculum that featured a New Critical approach to literary interpretation — Tyrone once more pits an emphasis on “group power” with a contradictory tendency to attend to the uniqueness of cultural products — in this case, poems — that are regarded as works distinct from a wider historicist matrix. While he defines the Civil Rights movement as a struggle for “citizenship rights for a group as opposed to an individual,” he postulates that a New Critical approach to reading “presupposes the movement of the literary object from the humanities to ‘literature’ and from literature to the individual poem.”[10] The political movement for Civil Rights and the cultural movement of New Criticism are distinct, but each sought to define citizenship, in the case of New Criticism by regarding the well-made poem as worthy of canonicity: “its citizenship in the pantheon of great literature a matter of how well it resists backsliding into history, politics, sociology, etc.”[11] As a poet and cultural analyst, Tyrone is a materialist. He is invested in language as part of a social text that may be deconstructed and reconstructed according to a progressivist agenda. His sermons reveal him to have been a person of the spirit who reads scriptures as a way to help us “as we make our way down the path of righteousness,” as he puts it in “This Vine, That City: The Ouch Contest,” which discusses “Jonah’s Anger at the Lord’s Compassion.”
Tyrone’s secular writings are in conversation with Marxism, poststructuralism, African American historiography, and, of course, advanced thinking in poetics. In the secular writings he also expresses the interest in transcendence from embodied experience in history that one hears so clearly in his sermons. For example, Tyrone supports the Civil Rights movement as an expression of “group power,” and he critiques the New Criticism because it focuses on the “individual poem,” but he is attracted to New Criticism and the Civil Rights movement because they rely on what he calls “transcendental” values: “Both ambiguity and integration attempt to transcend history as they look toward a more or less utopian future in which only ‘form’ and ‘character’ ‘mean’.”[12] Is it a great leap from Tyrone’s Platonic critique of the liberal arts as promoting iconoclastic individualism to his attraction to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians? We recall that Paul argues, in Tyrone’s terms, “the only way we can make sure we don’t slip back into bad habits forever (for being human, we will sin, despite our best intentions), the only control we have, is through community. For Paul, accountability to others is the only check and balance we have against our human nature in this world.”
Tyrone’s sermons explore the vexed issue of how to negotiate allegiance to the letter of the law when it conflicts with the spirit of the law. “Jesus, Jazz and Justice” is a remarkable example of his commentary on this theme because it combines Tyrone’s aesthetics, ethics, and his interests in cultural history and religious discourse. As a poet, cultural critic, and religious commentator, Tyrone has mastered the art of the in-between. He defies easy categorization and often takes positions that defy expectations. His musical tastes are a good example. On his website Heretofore, he displays a small-c catholicity in his enumeration of musical tastes and influences. Prominent “COMPOSERS and ARRANGERS” include African American jazz and soul stylists ranging from Ellington and Strayhorn to Miles and Sonny to Stevie and Smokey Robinson. He varies his selections in terms of genre, but his choices are mainstream when compared to free jazz experimentalists such as Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Roland Kirk, none of whom makes the list. When it comes to the contemporary avant-garde, we find British electronica figure Brian Eno and punk rocker Joe Strummer from The Clash. Alternative white female folkies such as Maggie Roche and Katie McGarrigle make the list. Most striking to me is his emphasis on white male composers associated with the Great American Songbook and Broadway: Leonard Bernstein, Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David. These composers produced numbers for the stage that African American jazz legends such as John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Carmen McRae reimagined as syncopated standards. As with Coltrane, Vaughan, and the others I have mentioned, signifying on traditional texts is most certainly a part of Tyrone’s modus operandi.His list of musical influences helps me think about how to read this sermon.
As with his poetry, we read his sermon as a form of resistance to stereotypical identifications of his writing with a reductive understanding of his subject position. In “Jesus, Jazz and Justice,” Tyrone focuses on “My Favorite Things,” written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the musical The Sound of Music (1959). In the sermon, Tyrone thinks through the cultural, political, aesthetic, and, in the end, spiritual implications of performances of this often-recorded standard from the Great American Songbook. On one hand, he admires renditions by Julie Andrews and The Supremes because these standard versions bring out the ways “My Favorite Things” is “a song that follows all the rules of musical composition for popular audiences, which is why it became a huge hit.” On the other hand, he admires the 1961 version by Coltrane, the innovative jazz saxophonist, “a thirteen-minute version of the song which was also a big hit.” Connecting aesthetic preferences to cultural conflicts and the ethics of following, bending, or breaking rules, he notes that “the two versions [Andrews’ and Coltrane’s] appealed to two different audiences” in the contentious period of the 1960s. Andrews’ was representative of a culture of conformism in which “you were supposed to follow the rules.” Coltrane, by contrast, risked being accused of performing “noise” or “garbage” because, as Lewis Porter notes, the bebop-influenced musician who had collaborated with the likes of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis bent the rules of melody by expanding solos over repeated phrases, altering chords from G Major to E Major and E Minor, and adding a Waltz tempo and Indian influence. Coltrane transformed the standard into a composition on the edge between recognizability and obscurity.[13] Contrasting Andrews’ rule-abiding version of “My Favorite Things” to Coltrane’s rule-bending one, and then connecting the two versions to American conflicts in the 1960s, Tyrone is not concerned with adjudicating how representatives of two racial groups reacted in a period characterized by social, political, and cultural change. Instead, he is laying out two notable approaches to promoting noble goals such as ending discrimination and struggling for “economic justice for African Americans.” By analogy to Andrews’ version, Tyrone asks if we should favor “working within the laws,” as did the NAACP. An alternative would be to take a militant approach and break the law, as did the Black Panthers. Or we could “stretch rules almost to the breaking point,” as Martin Luther King Jr. advocated. In this model, Coltrane’s version would connect with King Jr.’s strategies. Tyrone does not tell his fellow congregants which approach is the correct one. I suspect that he favors the Coltrane/King Jr. model, but he suggests that at different times and on different issues we may practice different tactics. To make this point, he turns to Jesus. At times, Jesus was “just an ordinary faithful Jew,” a rule follower, but at other points he seemed to the Pharisees to be a “once faithful young man [who] was starting to break the rules.” An alleged rule breaker, Jesus refuses to baptize John the Baptist, but asks John to baptize him, because Jesus says John should “fulfill the law.” Later, when accused of heresy, Jesus “does not defend himself” because he “submitted himself to the law.” Tyrone’s deepest message in his meditation about following, bending, or breaking rules concerns the relationship of justice to love. Following Jesus’ practice, he recommends that one needs to be flexible and react contextually to rules and laws. Here, Dr. King’s example, expressed most forcefully in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” comes to the fore. Tyrone argues, “justice is love that has not yet been made into law” and “Jesus himself said that of all the virtues love is the most important.” Following this logic, Tyrone reasons that breaking a secular law may be justified: “And sometimes we must act out of love even if, at that moment, it appears to be against the law.” Here, Tyrone evokes Dr. King’s willingness to sacrifice his “comfortable life in a middle-class neighborhood in Birmingham” and, of course, eventually his life, “for the cause of justice because he loved justice more than he loved respect or wealth.” Comparing King to Jesus to Coltrane, who deepens “our understanding of the relationship between notes and chords,” Tyrone argues that in the spheres of politics (King), spiritual teaching (Jesus), and aesthetics (Coltrane), “’radical” projects that were critiqued because they broke contemporaneous laws “would one day be turned into laws,” of a nation, of a church, or of a musical sensibility that is not so much “breaking rules” as “showing us those same rules with renewed clarity.” From this point of view, King and Jesus were, like Coltrane, avant-gardists, “like a jazz artist who knows that his music will one day be understood and appreciated even if only a few ‘get it’ while he was alive.” Reading Tyrone’s remarks, I think of his affiliation with Language Poetry, an avant-garde movement that, for many readers, seems difficult to appreciate, but which, in time, may seem commonplace. I think of how works of modernism, such as Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring,” Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Picasso’s “Guernica,” and “Potato Head Blues” by Louis Armstrong are now regarded as challenging, but evocative cultural landmarks that generations of followers have not only admired, but amplified with their own “radical” emendations.
I admire “Jesus, Jazz and Justice” for its synthesis of religion, politics, and culture, but there is something that bothers me about its thesis when Tyrone evokes the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17-20) in which Jesus claims that he is the fulfillment of the law, not the abolitionist of it. Here, Tyrone suggests, Jesus is distinguishing between following the law and following rules. To a degree that makes me, as a Jew, uncomfortable, Tyrone’s understanding of the distinction between following a law to the letter without paying attention to its spirit — which he connects to the Pharisaic approach, and, by analogy, to a “musician who only plays the notes without passion” — traffics in a supersession narrative. In such a narrative, the New Testament fulfills the promises of the Old Testament by replacing material prosperity with a spiritual conversion of terms such as “mansion” so that the magnificent domicile signifies everlasting grandeur in God’s “house.” One also wonders how Tyrone’s critique of the Pharisaic obedience to a law which they may not comprehend, but which they follow because it is God’s decree, diverges from his argument in other sermons that submission to laws suggests a faithful adherence to God’s will, which may defy human understanding. The “tough love” of his father in Detroit and his points in “Happy to Be Weak” that in both “New” and “Old” testaments God’s messages may “turn out not to be the ways of men and women” are examples, as are Abel being rewarded even as Cain works harder than his brother, and that the meek shall inherit the Earth. Why, I wondered, “must we know the law as well as the purpose of the law,” as he argues at the end of “Jesus, Jazz and Justice,” when so many biblical teachings defy common sense and a human sense of justice? Am I mistaking the word “purpose” for the word “understanding”? For Tyrone, righteousness relies on a quality akin to an artist’s intuitive sense of when to follow rules and when to break them. There is the sense that great artists — Coltrane, Picasso, Armstrong — had internalized the formal aspects of their medium so thoroughly that they could bring intuition into play when deciding to signify, to riff, or to make apparent mistakes somehow come out right. But how is an ordinary person who is not an aesthetic genius like Coltrane to know when to follow and when to break? Part of Tyrone’s argument is that the great artist’s primary audience is not human, but that we perform for God, who will hear what some regard as “so much noise to the world” as “the choral music of heaven.”
In a charming sermon entitled “Brave to Follow,” we learn that Tyrone’s road to the Winton Methodist congregation that became so central to his spiritual life occurred through a chance meeting with Kathy Howell. The story goes that when Tyrone moved from Detroit to Cincinnati in 1983, he noticed an apartment building off the interstate that had a vacancy sign. He had been on the way to see another apartment, but this one turned out to be a few dollars cheaper so he took it. It was at an informal Sunday gathering at a neighbor’s apartment that he met “a young seminary student, Kathy.” Centered on a story in Luke in which disciples make the momentous decision to leave a boatload of fresh-caught fish to follow Jesus, “Brave to Follow” makes the point that life has its turning points. Decisions we think of as crucial, such as leaving Detroit for Cincinnati, however, may turn out to be comparatively inconsequential, or only a foreshadowing of the truly significant moments — in this case meeting Kathy — that were contingent on what appears to have been dumb luck. Tyrone’s message is that we are not in control. God is in control, and God’s ways are mysterious. We are not privy to God’s meanings until the truth is unfolded as we struggle to follow God’s plan for us.
Tyrone recalls the story of his chance encounter with Kathy Howell in 1983 in “Brave to Follow,” but he goes deeper into the meaning of what her church meant to him once he joined it in 1987 in “Found Out(side).” In that sermon, Tyrone explains how his affiliation with Kathy’s ministry at Winton offers him “meaning, challenge, and purpose” from a perspective that “coalesces with and diverges from mine.” Writing “Found Out(side)” around 1997 — he joined the church in August 1987 and says that “this place has been an inexhaustible reservoir of friendship, support and understanding over the last ten years” — Tyrone represents himself as arriving at the church in the uncomfortable situation of being a nowhere man with a divided self. No longer identifying himself as a Detroiter, he has not taken a shine to Cincinnati, which he describes as holding “parochial and reactionary values.” On an interpersonal level, he meets Kathy at a challenging moment when he is engaged in an ill-fated relationship with a “live-in lover” that he characterizes as “co-dependent,” as “hostile, stormy, embattled.” He is casting about, an aimless ship at sea: “partying at the pool, hanging out in the bar/restaurant on the premises of the complex, dancing and meeting women at January’s, a now defunct nightclub on Pete Rose Way.” Dwelling in an uncomfortable state of in-betweenness, “adrift and occasionally capsized at sea,” Tyrone finds himself, as he says in another sermon, “At the Feet of Judas,” in which he recalls taking part in an “evening feet-washing ritual in this church as part of our preparation for trying to recruit new church members,” “out of my comfort zone.” It is in this existential situation of insecurity, placelessness, or, as he says in “At the Feet of Judas, “of “humility” and “vulnerability,” that Tyrone takes a leap of faith. He decides to regard the congregants of Winton as “family members” and to accept Kathy’s invitation to join her “modest brick church, with scarcely thirty members” in “an integrated working-class neighborhood” on Winton Place. Most importantly, Tyrone describes Kathy’s church as the only place in Cincinnati “that I keep coming back to,” but one that is affiliated with a “denomination and doctrine — which largely escapes me.” Whereas he favors maintaining a hierarchical relationship between teachers and students with his message that Paul is interested in a labor of love with the Corinthians, not in a labor of being liked, in tone, level of diction, and sentiment, his sermons create what Buber would refer to as an I-Thou relationship to his fellow congregants. Uncertain of Winton’s “denomination and doctrine,” he nonetheless regards fellow parishioners as fellow seekers who may be lost and uncertain, but who engage in a common struggle to glean meaning that matters today from opaque and ancient texts.
Notes
[1] “Williams’s work draws on a variety of sources to challenge and investigate language, history, and race. In an interview with the Volta Williams noted, “I don’t ‘revere’ the English language but I use it and, on occasion, abuse it.” And of his interest in grammar and linguistics, he stated: “every grammatical marker is purposeful … every torque of the language renders ‘meaning’ problematic — which seems to me the precise ‘condition’ of African-American existence in particular and ‘American’ life in general.”” (Poetry Foundation Website)
[2] Tyrone is a poet who is oriented toward Language Writing, which “tends to draw the reader’s attention to the uses of language in a poem that contributes to the creation of meaning.” (Poetry Foundation Website). As a poet, he understands how, in Heidegger’s terms, “Language is the House of Being” and meaning occurs in and through language, even as language is an inadequate vehicle for transmitting meaning. Close reading skills, associated with the teaching of poems in the classroom, help fill in the breach.
[3] In a Denver Quarterly interview with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Williams reflects on his working-class roots and penchant for experimental writing in Detroit: “I grew up in a working-class family — my dad worked in all three of the plants (Chrysler, Ford, GM) before driving a truck for a distilled water company; my mother was, for a while, a housecleaner in a home for retired women (all white) before she began working in the public schools — and I had a number of service jobs (shoe salesman, grocery store clerk, etc.). My Detroit is labor intensive in every sense of the phrase. So it’s safe to say that my poetry, though it has changed over the years, has perhaps become more complex (though I was writing “experimental” poems under the influence of the Cass Corridor radical/post-hippie scene around Wayne State long before I’d heard of avant-garde movements like the Language Poets), is informed by a working-class/labor ethos.”
[4] Tyrone Williams, “‘Apparently I Am Picking Fights’: Cultural Studies and Poetics Mix It Up in Taylor Brady’s Yesterday’s News,” Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, no. 18 (2007), 66.
[5] Ibid., 67.
[6] Needless to say, Tyrone is categorically NOT defending “this rhetoric of submission which remains so inflammatory for many of us today.”
[7] Tyrone Williams, “New Criticism and the Civil Rights Movement: Identity Politics and the Liberal Arts,” Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, no. 23 (2010), 21.
[8] Ibid., 11.
[9] Ibid., 19.
[10] Ibid., 20.
[11] Ibid., 22.
[12] Ibid., 22.
[13] Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (University of Michigan Press, 1999), 182-183.