Celebrities Are People Too

One theme that emerged in writing Sudarium was the nature and dysfunctionality of celebrity. Not surprisingly, finding out that Jesus had been cloned and was now a 30-year-old woman evokes quite the global response in the book.

While I had a lot of fun with the notoriety facing Jennifer and her mother (see Chapters 24-29 and 33 in particular), it was sobering to plot the price they paid for becoming famous.

Celebrities get the ego-stroking experiences of being recognized and perhaps beloved, often they are highly compensated, and they have many choices about using their influence that the rest of us don’t worry about.

But then there are physical safety issues when it comes to where they live and how they move around in daily life. There’s the nasty deluge of online snark. And there’s the loss of privacy; while it may be nice to recognized, it’s also good to be able to go the grocery store without encountering intrusive strangers.

This diagnosis leads us to a few useful questions:

• How do you personally view celebrity in general and selected celebrities specifically?

• What encourages you about the celebrities you admire?

• Are there emotions like envy, dislike, or escape that celebrities evoke in you?

We humans are story-based life forms, so it’s natural to orient to people who are gifted, rich, beautiful, influential. It’s helpful to align to those who tell the stories we love, to those who represent who we aspire to become.

And it may be less helpful to enjoy imaginary friendships with famous people, to criticize someone without actually knowing what’s true about them, and to project our own unresolved challenges onto high-profile people.

I hope Sudarium will encourage you to refine your relationship to celebrity, and maybe even your relationship to celebrities. I know Jennifer would appreciate that.