I wasn’t feeling too well and stayed home from work yesterday and ended up watching pretty much the entire memorial special. As the program progressed (are you kidding me? Lionel Richie singing “Jesus is Love?” how beautiful was that?), I started crying like a baby because it occurred to me that Michael Jackson was much more than a superstar singer/dancer, mortally wounded on a soul level by a bizarre childhood that none of us can relate to, he was a brother, a father, a son, and a friend. He was a human being, yes, greatly flawed, but also greatly, GREATLY loved by the Creator of the Universe, and many family and friends. He was obviously worshipped and adored by millions of fans.

I truly hope he is with the Lord now, I hope his tortured soul is now at peace.

Thanks again for your good article.

Dave

This commentary places the life of Michael Jackson into the same arc of life you find in the movie Tommie from the mid-1970s. Yes, I’m referring to the rock opera by the Who that was turned into a full-length motion picture and music video.

I think I was the only citizen of the world that actually loved Tommie. That is, I loved the plot, symbolism, as well as the music. I was convinced someone had been reading the Gospel of Matthew.

Hopefully some of you place Tommie on your Netflix cue and give it a look. If you accept–or recognize–the symbolism used in its most direct meaning, a few of you will be surprised it came from Hollywood. (Personally, I feel that decisions in Hollywood are made by all sorts and conditions of humans. Therefore, it is wrong to think Hollywood movies only reflect one point of view.)

The movie revolves around this line from one of the songs:

“How can he be saved/from the eternal grave?”

It isn’t too often you find any movie that creates a burning trash dump in exactly the same way Jesus referred to one in the Sermon on the Mount.

There is only one thing I didn’t see in the Jackson commentary. There should have been some comment about how, with most people’s lives, Jackson’s life was so weird that most any of us could feel normal by comparison. That and entertainment: a winning combination.