A long time ago I came across a prayer for Marilyn Monroe, written by Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan Catholic poet-politician. It is a careful account of what happens to a woman who becomes iconic, and whose value and identity are conferred on her by public attention and media hype. Marilyn Monroe the celebrity was created by a culture hungry for glamour, eager for scandal, and addicted to vicarious experience. Vicarious experience is when we can observe from a safe distance other people living the life we wish we could but never will, or in which their hurt and brokenness becomes a spectacle, a performance which we watch without ever encountering the painful reality.
When I say the prayer for Marilyn Monroe is a "careful account", I mean the account was full of that kind of care that begins with compassion, moves to anger and ends with a prayer for her peace, and for our forgiveness for reducing a human being to the level of our personal entertainment.
I am feeling something similar about the coverage of Jade Goody's illness. I've accompanied enough people through this later stage of a life journey to respect vulnerability, revere human courage, recognise the beauty and poignancy of our very human desire to live the gift of life fully. To do this in the public eye, with privacy auctioned to Digital TV and tabloid papers, and for the entire process to be orchestrated by a publicist, indicates a culture in which ethical norms and respect for human dignity have encountered their own credit crunch. We have become voyeurs of grief, trying to make death a virtual reality.
The good that is done in publicising the need for vigilance and research funding for this kind of cancer; the earning of enough money to ensure financial security for her children; even the strength Jade herself generates through turning her last weeks into a reality TV performance; each of these can be defended as reasons why Jade is doing this.
And I have no criticism whatsoever for her. My sadness and outrage come from somewhere else. Jade Goody's life story is one in which some of the most serious deficiencies in our social care of children and vulnerable young people are exposed. Since her career was launched through Big Brother she has endured adulation and opprobrium, that see-saw of love and hate the media revels in all the way to the bank, but which is lethally corrosive of a person's identity and self-worth. Our fascination with celebrity culture over mere humanity, our preference for reality TV instead of reality, our capacity through media coverage to make and break our gods (lower case intended), and the huge financial power of fame and infamy as vehicles for public entertainment; these have created a culture in which the celebrity is no longer considered a human person, and the first stone always lies nearby, ready to be thrown. There can be few more damning illustrations of our society's lost values than our endorsing of a process which puts entertainment value on a young woman's dying. I think what I find most distressing in this is the default selfishness of a culture where tears, sympathy and even grief are dissolved into the acid of reality TV and celebrity public self-exposure.
All of this arises out of praying the Lord's Prayer. How? Because that clause about being forgiven as we forgive those who sin against us, raised for me the old question about the sinner and the sinned against. Is Jade Goody sinner or sinned against? In one sense we all are – sinner and sinned against. But in some lives the damage sustained in growing up and trying to make a way in life seems disproportionate. And it can decisively shape who we are.
But this I believe. Whoever Jade Goody really is, God knows. I mean it. God does know. And the love and assurance, the security and the peace, the acceptance and healing of soul that we all long for, Jade included, depend on the truth of that central affirmation of Christian faith, that in Jesus, the friend of sinners, we are shown that God is love – and what kind of love God is. Jade and her children have been christened – I've no idea what all that was about other than this. In God's eyes Jade Goody is not and never has been, the composite cipher of a media circus. She is a daughter, a woman, a mother, a person with a name, and she is known to God. And the God whose love is seen in Jesus will treat her with a compassion and love infinitely more redemptive and non-judgmental than the celebrity culture that thinks it created her. Jesus doesn't throw stones.
Jade Goody hasn't tried too hard to conform to the expectations of "respectable society" – like other in your face celebrities she's been exploited by her public. In fact she reminds me more of those less reputable women whose names Jesus knew. Those women who found that when it comes to knowing who they are, and being gifted with a deeper sense of their value and loveability, it isn't the media machine, or the all consuming audience that matter. It's the One who knows and speaks their true name, and who knows more deeply than any other, that there are those who love much because they have been forgiven much (the name of the Dali painting above).
And so I pray. ….."Our Father, ….forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us". Sinner and sinned against – hard to separate, hard to know. God knows though. And that's enough – for Jade and for us, and for Jade as included in us fallible, wounded, wondering and loved sinners that we all are.
Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy