Madonna’s Dilemma

Cover of latest issue of Harper’s BAZAAR magazine.

New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be. It did not welcome me with open arms. The first year, I was held up at gunpoint. Raped on the roof of a building I was dragged up to with a knife in my back.

The November issue of Bazaar contains an essay that pop star Madonna has written about herself, a reflection on her 30 years in show business. Known legally as Madonna Louise Ciccone, the singer-songwriter, now 55 and counting, writes about her arrival in New York City in 1977.  Today she is the best-selling female music artist of the 20th century with a gross of 300 million records worldwide.  Raised Roman Catholic, she has often been at odds with her childhood faith. That faith was first shaken when her mother died from cancer. Madonna was just five-years-old at the time. This lead to a childhood of heartache and fear, terrified her father would also be taken from her.  As a teenager she became rebellious and grew to hate her father. As a wildly successful pop star she pushed the moral envelope as far as possible, mocking virginity, the Catholic Church, posing nude, and performing in a dominatrix outfit while surrounded by topless dancers.

It’s the quote above I want to focus on, her admission of a violent rape at the genesis of her career. This terrible trauma, alone with the fear and abandonment she felt as a child, fits a pattern often seen when ministering to women who have suffered repeated violations of their personal safety. Admittedly analyzing this from afar, I can nevertheless conclude that some things about Madonna’s life conform to a paradigm of demonic attack. Death, rebellion, anti-Christian anger, sexual exploration, bitterness against God, sexual abuse/violence, and the ultimate assumption of a Jezebel persona to fight back. Does Madonna have demons? Who could say for certain? But based on my decades of experience spiritually helping women with similar scenarios (although much less famous and financially successful) the clues are clear. I feel sad, in a way, for Madonna because inside there is a terrified, lonely and hurting child who is trapped in the body of a publicly sensuous woman; a woman who assuages her inner torment by outwardly controlling everyone and everything in her life. Classic Jezebel. She certainly needs inner healing and likely an exorcism.  Not because she’s a bad person, though much of her performing behavior has been morally reprehensible. She needs help because much of the emotional makeup of her pain wasn’t her fault. She was a victim. What’s sad is that she never returned to the roots of her faith, but instead made more moral victims vicariously through her flaunting of indecency and mocking of Christianity.