WHY DID WHITNEY HOUSTON DIE? (2)

Her worldly success didn’t help her overcome her personal demons? Demons? Was addiction to cocaine a demon? Or was it the worldly success or both? If so, apparently not even the prayers of Christians in the music industry succeeded in casting out that demon or demons? For as Grady chronicled, “Christians in the music industry reached out to Whitney and prayed with her during her up-and-down battle with addictions. But the drugs had a powerful pull. In 2006, a photo was released of her bathroom sink in Atlanta filled with crack pipes, drug paraphernalia, cigarettes and beer cans. Even after she divorced Bobby Brown in 2007, the downward spiral continued”.

Whitney Houston was sent off with dignity, as planned, last Saturday. Her body was interred on Sunday leaving the world the poorer for it. She certainly would be sorely missed. But, as I pointed out the last time, “the questions remain, un-interred with her body.”  Such questions as: why she had to die at a mere 48…why her life took a sudden dive for the worse right at the peak of her career…why she became associated with crack, cocaine and prescription drugs, such that all speculations about her death hover around drugs and it would take the outcome of toxicology tests still being awaited, to dispel it?”

In trying to find some form of answer or the other to these and many other questions, I spoke about two of the avalanche of writings about her life and times, her place in the entertainment industry and her life as a Christian that caught my attention.

The first, from which I quoted quite bit, was an online piece titled “Whitney Houston’s Death and the Secret-Society Called the Music Industry,” which I erroneously attributed to A. J. Ramsey. It has since dawned on me that the piece was written by Ra Imhotep, while Ramsey’s every1letstalk.com website was simply one of the many that carried the article? Apologies to all.

The essence of the article, which has since gone viral in cyberspace, was that Whitney was a victim of witchcraft. He recalled how she started out in the choir, had the song “Guide Me O Jehova” as her first solo performance, became “one of the few entertainers who got a record deal, because of her true talent and not because of connections and affiliations that she had” and thus “paved the way, with her voice and image, for many diva’s that would come after her…”

Relying heavily on the words of one John Todd, whom he described as “a so called ex-member of the Illuminati, who was a music executive in the 70’s”, Imhotep went on to posit that Whitney must have been initiated into witchcraft at the onset of or at some point in her rise to fame and fortune. He quoted Todd as stating that “every musician and entertainer in the music industry and Hollywood, has to be a initiated wizard or witch before they are offered a recording contract” and that after a “record is cut and the master is finished, it is then given to a coven of witches and wizards who conjure up a demon. Once the demon is conjured the witches and wizards ask the entity to attach itself to every copy or duplicate that is sold to the public, which guarantees the success of the record and also takes control of the listener.”  

Imhotep declared: “the music industry is a cult and once one gets a record deal they are now an initiate and are a part of the cult for life. Whitney Houston was no exception to this rule and she took the oath back in the 70’s. Once the oath is pledged you become the property of the record labels and the machines and you can NEVER retire. The only way out of the game is death…”  

He went on to make a number of claims and drew links between events and personalities in the entertainment industry that neither space nor the nature of this forum, would permit me to go into here.

The second of the articles addressed a different angle to the issue: Whitney’s spiritual life as a Christian. Written by one of my favourite columnists, J. Lee Grady, in his Fire In My Bones column in Charisma online of Wednesday of February 15, 2012, he addressed what he called “the silent shame of addiction”.

In his inimitable style, Grady, a former editor of Charisma magazine, raised a number of fundamental issues that I know the body of Christ must address urgently. One or two of those points have agitated my mind since then.

First, he asserted that “anyone who has listened to Whitney Houston’s rendition of ‘I Love the Lord’—or who saw her perform with CeCe Winans and Shirley Caesar at the 1996 Grammy Awards—knows she had an incomparable voice best suited for gospel music.”  Note this please: an incomparable voice best suited for gospel music.

Grady continued: “But Whitney chose a broader path: When the doors opened for her to make a pop album in the 1980s, it became the all-time best-selling debut album by a female artist. She became America’s diva.” Was that the fundamental problem then? A “broader path”; a voice best suited for the gospel, but applied more to pop music?

Let’s continue with Grady’s perspective: “But all her worldly success didn’t help her overcome her personal demons. Her stormy marriage was marred by domestic violence. She admitted in the 1990s that she took cocaine every day. She tried rehab three times over the course of eight years. Her voice was so damaged by her drug habit that people walked out of her comeback concert in London in 2010. She became a pathetic shell of her former self…”

Her worldly success didn’t help her overcome her personal demons? Demons? Was addiction to cocaine a demon? Or was it the worldly success or both? If so, apparently not even the prayers of Christians in the music industry succeeded in casting out that demon or demons? For as Grady chronicled, “Christians in the music industry reached out to Whitney and prayed with her during her up-and-down battle with addictions. But the drugs had a powerful pull. In 2006, a photo was released of her bathroom sink in Atlanta filled with crack pipes, drug paraphernalia, cigarettes and beer cans. Even after she divorced Bobby Brown in 2007, the downward spiral continued”.

As this perceptive writer was wont to do, Grady dropped an important hint when he noted that Whitney passed on “just two days after she sang an impromptu version of “Jesus Loves Me” at a Hollywood nightclub”, and added: “I’d like to believe it was a feeble cry to the God of her childhood…” (CONTINUES)