On Music, Faith, and Whitney Houston

This week I sold my soul to the iTunes devil.

It may have started with the Grammy Awards on Sunday. While it wasn't an impressive show, it did inspire me to check out some new stuff, such as the Civil Wars and some of Rihanna's new music. I also relived some old favorites, ranging from the Beach Boys to Goodie Mob. The Beach Boys were the first band I loved as a kid, and when my parents tried to take me to see them live, we got rained out. Twice. They reunited to play at the Grammys and they were great! (Even with Maroon 5 and some group that looked like it would rather be Occupying something horning in...)

And then there was the death of Whitney Houston. It irks me when someone dies and suddenly, everyone in the world was their greatest fan, especially when it's someone you haven't thought about in years. I'd just gotten home last Saturday night and was settling in to watch the Charlie Brown Valentine's Day special and work on editing my book when ABC News cut in with a special announcement. I just knew we were going to war with Iran, but no, the anchor dude cut into my Charlie Brown time to tell me Whitney Houston had been found dead somewhere for some reason. I used to be a big Whitney fan back in the day, and I felt bad for her family, but I was not especially moved by this announcement. However, the voyeur in me ended up glued to the unwarranted, non-stop breaking news coverage for the next few hours. So much for editing my book.

I didn't start blasting I Will Always Love You on my iPod after that (though for some reason I did have My Prerogative stuck in my head), but by Monday, I had pulled out the greatest hits album and downloaded a few other songs. I'd heard two days of snippets of all these songs I used to love when I was a kid, and I needed to hear more or my brain was going to explode. It did bring back a flood of great childhood memories. I remembered my best friend Melissa and I laying in her living room floor, watching The Bodyguard and fawning over Kevin Costner. I remembered my cousin Emily and I dancing to some of those songs in my grandparents' basement like we used to do. I remembered driving around Athens and listening to My Love is Your Love during my freshman year of college. Those were nice memories to relive.
 
Fast forward to yesterday, Saturday, the day of Whitney Houston's funeral.

I had zero plans to watch it. I had plans to turn off my TV, shut down my computer, and start marking up my book with a red (well, actually it was green) pen (and technically it was a marker). But my parents wanted to watch it, and they don't have cable, so I went to try to set it up for them on their computer. When I got back to my house, I left it on while I was making my lunch, and because I'm nosy, I kept watching to see if I could see who was there and what they were doing. And then I thought some of the religious figures had some nice things to say and then Tyler Perry was going to speak, so I wanted to see what he would say, and his speech was amazing.. And then I saw that Kevin Costner would be speaking soon, and of course, I wanted to see what's going on with him these days. Long story short, I watched most of the doggone funeral. Sure, part of it was me being a voyeur again, but a big part of it, I realized, was a thirst for something more.

A friend of mine, Jenny Waite, posted this on her Facebook page yesterday: "Whitney Houston made a lot of mistakes, but she had a sincere faith, and her final act got millions of people to go church in Newark in the middle of a Saturday."  (Edited to add: she also wrote about Whitney Houston's funeral here.)

Back during the Tim Tebow craze, my mom and I really got into it because she claimed people were thirsty for religion and that's why they were jumping on his bandwagon. As I've stated, I find turning to him because you're thirsty for religion to be somewhat sacrilegious, but I did understand what she was getting at. So many people in our country are so quick to hate these days. We are in a very polarized place. And not just that, but when I see people argue about certain issues, I am saddened to see that many of them will find a way to push their own faith and values under the carpet in favor of convenience or being what they feel others want them to be or just for the sake of being right. And I'm strictly talking about how individual people live their daily lives here, particularly Christians. It saddens me to see it, but I can't control what other people do. I can only try to be the best person I can be, and I can only try to love everyone else the way I know God loves me.

So many people turned into Whitney Houston's funeral yesterday, and so many people were talking about her faith, their own faith, and the faith of others. I scrolled through Twitter several times and checked out various news and celebrity gossip websites to see what people were saying. They weren't just talking about Whitney Houston and whether or not Bobby Brown was there and how good Kevin Costner still looks; they were talking about church and God and Jesus and prayer. One website, I believe it was CNN, had a picture of people standing in New York, watching the funeral on a big screen,and the headline read, "The Nation Goes to Church." Indeed they did. 

Regardless of how you feel about Whitney Houston's life, her music, her choices, her addictions or anything else, her faith was inspiring. It does seem like people are thirsty for something, myself included. Even if they don't know it. And if it took the funeral of a pop star to get us there, just for a day, then maybe everything does happen for a reason.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite Whitney songs that didn't get a lot of play this week: