Wherever you turn in the UK, there is Jade Goody: television, online, newspapers, radio chat shows. Her media presence these last couple weeks has led me to think of her as a quasi-omnipresent being, like some sort of ancient Sumerian demi-goddess.
‘Who is Jade Goody?’, you ask. She rose to stardom as the girl people loved to hate on UK Big Brother (I still do not understand what people here like about this show, but it goes to show that Britain isn’t all tea and crumpets!)
As one blogger described her: Only a few months ago this appalling creation of reality television seemed to represent all that was wrong with modern society. She was a superficial and crass product of legendary Essex; variously referred to as being a ‘pig-faced’, ‘loud-mouthed’, ‘ignorant’, ‘selfish’, ‘racist’ and ‘self-promoting’ chav. Her life was just that of another quasi-celebrity – a two-dimensional virtual existence with no higher purpose other than to copulate and consume; to wallow in Armani excess whilst patiently awaiting an invitation to stumble onto ‘Dancing on Ice’. She was a commodity of Max Clifford who owned her, the chat shows which fed off her, the ‘celebrity’ culture which scoffed at her, and the ‘red-tops’ which would one day destroy her. The inexorable course of her petty and pointless existence was set.
Ahem. How did Jade get to this point? Her biography, what I’ve read of it, is the rambling and prurient tale of an Essex girl who continued to live out a life that seems to still have its stiletto-heeled boots stuck in the mud of a very unpleasant childhood, ‘My dad was a heroin addict and never gave me anything except a couple of things that he nicked. He told my mum his name was Cyrus, so she went and had his name tattooed on her arm and then she found out he was called Antony, after all.
I used to roll joints for my mum when I was four years old because I’ve always wanted to be helpful, and my mum gave me a huge kiss after I managed to hide all the stolen chequebooks in the freezer when the police raided us. I’ve always loved my mum, even when people gave her a hard time for being a one-armed lesbian.’
But Jade is falling as quickly as she ascended thanks to a terminal illness: cervical cancer. While the parties and the in-your-face lifestyle are now a thing of the past, it appears that Jade is making other news…good news. Apparently, she’s been looking to God in the midst of her darkness.
“I’ve always thought there’s a God although I’ve never been a churchy kind of person but now I think, ‘Why not go to church?’
“I’ve got a version of the Bible which is easy to read and I look through it when I’m feeling down. It really helps.”
“And I’ve always prayed but now I do find it helps. Maybe the big man upstairs thinks, ‘She’s a tough cookie, she can handle this. She’s watched her dad inject heroin, watched her mum do crack, she’s lost a baby, had boyfriends who’ve hit her. Yeah, she can handle this too.’
“But I do think after this is over, God might think I’ve had more than my fair share to deal with.”
Jade illustrates the fact that it is incredibly tempting to rush to judgment, to dislike the unlikable parts of people, to sew the red letter upon their lapel and use it as a justification for writing them off. However, despite the fact that Jade’s life has been…um, colorful, I am struck by how easy it is to judge people for their past, to consider them irredeemable recipients of justly-deserved consequences.
I pray that Jade has or will soon heard the life-changing message that 2000 years ago Jesus Christ atoned for the sins of the world, that we become new creations in Him, and that the Gospel is Good News simply because it takes who we really were/are and nails it to a cross.
5 comments
Sean Norris says:
Mar 9, 2009
Wow, Dylan. Thank you for this. It is a heart-braking story, and I am sure it is unfortunately not unique. It reminds me of the thing that connected with me most wen i first heard the Gospel, and that was that we are all sufferers.
As Don Chaffer of Waterdeep sings, “I am haunted by my love for comparison.” (from the song “And”) We all want to find someone else who is worse than us, someone that we can put down to build ourselves up. I think this is because it is not safe to suffer as much as we do. We cannot actually handle the pain of our lives and so we become split, compartmentalized. We are two (or more) different people. We spend our time building a facade that we think will protect us, but it never does. Part of this facade is deflecting attention from our own shattered lives to people like Jade.
BUT when the message of the Gospel comes we suddenly find that there is a safe place to be who we actually are. We find Someone who “tells us all we ever did” and it sets us free. We see that we are fully known by Him and loved by Him and this lets us live in our own skin, maybe for the first time. Comparing ourselves to others stops, and it is replaced with compassion because we know all too well that we suffer too just like them.
Thanks again, Dylan. Really ministered to me from across the pond:)
Caroline Henley says:
Mar 9, 2009
seriously–just about 1 in 3 women around her age have hpv!
Mattie says:
Mar 9, 2009
goody and her kids got baptized yesterday:
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20263879,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines
as an aside – there are ways to get cervical cancer other than HPV. a former boss of mine who was a nun (and while i never asked her if she had been sexually active before she entered religious life i think it was highly unlikely) had cervical cancer and the doctors insisted that she could have had the cancer and have been a virgin. the etiology of cevical cancer is officially unknown. there may be risk factors (incl. HPV), but it has never been proven that HPV causes all cervical cancers.
i was diagnosed with kidney cancer a few weeks ago and the doctors can’t tell me why. because i used to be a light smoker? maybe, but i never smoked more than a pack a week for a couple years and haven’t smoked in quite a while. others who smoke a pack a day don’t get cancer…. because when i sprained my wrist last year i used vicodin for a while? maybe, but others are opiate addicts and don’t end up with cancer… we don’t really know why some people get cancer and others don’t.
so i think that blaming goody’s cancer on her choices is going a little too far.
thanks for the post,
mattie
dpotter says:
Mar 9, 2009
Hi Mattie,
First, let me say that I am sorry to hear about the news you recently received, but I’m thankful that you shared it with us. I’m sure I won’t be the only one on M’bird to pray for you. Also, I agree with you about the etiology of cancer in general–it is an absolutely unpredictable tornado.
Further, I take your comment about correlations between HPV and cervical cancer. (In the post, I tried to qualify the connection with the word ‘likely’ for that reason). All the data I’ve seen thus far from both the CDC and the National Cancer Institute seems to suggest otherwise, but I would be happy to have a look at other data sources which might shed light on non-HPV cases, I was simply unable to find anything to suggest the contrary. Perhaps this illustrates a pressing educational need: a website that documents cases/studies to the contrary.
Nonetheless, I will happily remove a substantial part of the article as a show of support for your wise appeal for fairness in all things.
Truly,
-Dylan
Mattie says:
Mar 12, 2009
dylan,
thanks first and foremost for your prayers. i had my left kidney removed two weeks ago and the surgeon thinks they got all the cancer. praise God.
i did some checking and your initial thoughts were more accurate than i wanted to admit. i checked a recent medical textbook which says that HPV DNA is found in 99.7% of all cervical carcinomas. so… while it is possible that there are other etiologies for cervical cancer, it can be classified as a sexually transmitted disease. so… that’s that.
i guess the bigger point that i struggle with is the idea of how much to “blame” people for their choices. i’m catholic (more augustinian than thomistic, but catholic nonetheless) so i do believe in free will, but i also believe in the power of original sin and believe our world is permeated by bad choices and the deathly outcomes of sin (cf. rm 6:23). but what about those monogamous women who get HPV from their previously sexually active partners? Or those women in Africa who get AIDS because their cheating husbands don’t wear condoms? Or those who grow up with a parent who smokes and end up suffering the long term effects of second hand smoke? i guess the bigger point is that i find it hard to blame even the alcoholic who needs a liver transplant their… because disease is as insidious as original sin and it is hard to place responsibility.
i’m fascinated by the idea that sin is a disease (an image that augustine loved) and that salvation is cure, protection, and pallative.
thanks again for your post… while i don’t hardly ever comment i really enjoy reading mockingbird regularly.
mattie