Whitney Houston’s funeral: An uplifting ‘home going’ from New Hope
It bears noting up top the odd juxtaposition of watching Whitney Houston’s funeral on television stations called E! Entertainment and Black Entertainment Television, as even though the reduction of a singular voice is indeed an entertainment, one thing to observe with morning coffee. Houston, even so, was an entertainer, and her images have permeated tv both in great instances and in poor considering that her rise in the mid 1980s, so there is a particular symmetry at operate.
But that is the cynical view of the broadcast of Houston’s “home going,” a private church service streamed on the World wide web from the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, N.J., the exact same church wherever her household belonged and where a youthful Whitney realized to sing.
And any cynicism was obliterated with the quite initial pictures of the within of New Hope, where a choir a hundred strong of males clad in black, women in white, hands clapping, lifted their arms to the sky, sang hymns to their Lord and offered a farewell filled with the identical emotional spirit that their departed pal presented to the planet.
Full COVERAGE: Whitney Houston | 1963-2012
In those faces weren’t mere fans, but a congregation who sang the words in glorious harmony, “And I shall dwell in the residence of the Lord forever and ever.” The voices commanded that you believe them, and in the method, at least for outsiders, illustrated in pure harmony the globe that gave birth to Whitney Houston’s voice, even as it affirmed that the very same spirit will carry on to ring for generations to come in Newark.