Secondary: Rapid Response Assemblies


A reflection on the life of Michael Jackson
By Paul Hess

Suitable for Whole School

Aim

To help students see that human beings find fulfilment through love.

Preparation and materials

• You could use any Michael Jackson song to introduce the assembly – there are many great ones to choose from! However, it would fit in well with the themes of the assembly if you can find a song from his childhood, when singing with the Jackson 5, e.g. ‘I Want You Back’ or ‘ABC’.
• Bible reading: 1 John 4.7–12.

Assembly

1. I am going to say something I have never said before and this is the truth. I have no reason to lie to you and God knows I am telling the truth. I think all my success and fame, and I have wanted it, I have wanted it because I wanted to be loved. That’s all. That’s the real truth. I wanted people to love me, truly love me, because I never really felt loved.
   
   I said I know I have an ability. Maybe if I sharpened my craft, maybe people will love me more. I just wanted to be loved because I think it is very important to be loved and to tell people that you love them and to look in their eyes and say it.
   
   These are the words of Michael Jackson to his one-time spiritual mentor, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. They are very sad and moving words which seem to sum up the tragedy of Michael Jackson’s life: more than anything else he was looking for a love that he never found.
   
2. Undoubtedly Michael Jackson was one of the most talented human beings of our time. And yet it seems that it was precisely his extraordinary talent that appeared to be the cause of much of his pain. For as long as he could remember, Michael Jackson was a performer – adored for his singing and dancing. It appears that his father drove him on relentlessly and often cruelly – which reinforced in young Michael’s mind that in order to be loved he had to perform.
   
3. The early videos of Michael Jackson are rather poignant now. For we know that behind the young Michael’s bright eyes and shining face there lay a great deal of sadness. Robbed of a normal, loving childhood when he was young, later on he would seek to construct a fantasy of childhood for himself in adulthood.
   
4. It is, of course, very difficult for us to know the truth about the allegations against him, but it was this desire to retrieve his lost childhood that drove him to seek out the company of children – very possibly in all innocence. At the deepest level, he wanted to be loved as children are – simply for who he was, rather than for his talents as a performer.
   
5. Michael Jackson also became entrapped in what would become for him the tragic world of celebrity. It was a world in which money and consumption were substitutes for genuine intimacy, in which the admiration of millions became confused with love, and in which he used an ever more lethal cocktail of drugs to deaden the unfulfilled emotional longings within him.
   
6. Michael Jackson’s story is a modern tragedy, a tragedy produced by a society constructed on the myth that talent, achievement, wealth and fame – which Michael Jackson appeared to have more than anyone – can bring us ultimate fulfilment.
   
   We may – rightly – pursue many worthy goals and ambitions in our lives. Yet if the basis for our happiness is in the status, achievement or the admiration of the crowd, we will find ourselves ultimately disappointed and feeling empty.
   
7. Very few of us have anything like the talent of Michael Jackson and it is highly unlikely that any of us will ever experience his sort of fame and wealth. But in reality we are not so different from him at all. The truth about Michael Jackson, and every other human being, is that we need two fundamental things to be truly happy: to be loved and to love.

Time for reflection

Reflection

This reading expresses that the core of the Christian faith is love: the God who loves us unconditionally (for who we are, not for how we perform or what we do) and our calling to love other people.

Read 1 John 4.7–12

Prayer

Lord, thank you for your unconditional love for each one of us.

May we love as we are loved.

Amen.