Currently streaming on Netflix, Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was … is not for the faint of heart. But if you can take a lot of bad language and raw talk, it’ll make you laugh, and it’ll make you cry.
What Happened to Jamie Foxx?
Back in April 2023, Foxx (legal name Eric Bishop) suffered a medical emergency that took him out of the public eye for many months. Rumors ran rampant, including an Internet meme that Foxx had died and been replaced by a clone.
Performing in October in front of a packed Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, Foxx revealed that he had a brain bleed that caused a stroke — and that the doctors at Piedmont Hospital (just 400 yards from the theater) saved his life.
But it was his sister Diedra Dixon, whom he described as “4-foot-11 of nothing but pure love,” who recognized the severity of his “headache,” and took her brother to the hospital.
Of that, Foxx said, “She drove around — she didn’t know anything about Piedmont Hospital, but she had a hunch that some angels [were] in there.”
He relates how his sister knelt and prayed during the surgery that followed, and knew that the doctor would not find the source of the bleeding, because she had “talked to God.”
Foxx eventually wound up in a rehab center in Chicago, where he faced a long, humiliating, excruciating road to recovery.
The Testimony of Jamie Foxx
With humor, heart and music, Foxx tells the story of his recovery — often in graphic detail — but the overall messages of the special were to thank those in his life who protected and supported him … and to give glory to God both for his stroke and his recovery.
This did not set well with a critic at MSNBC.com:
Jamie Foxx believes that God afflicted him because he’d stopped attending church.
“When I forgot about God,” the comedian tells an Atlanta audience in his new Netflix special, “he blessed me with a stroke.”
A viewer unfamiliar with the peculiarities of Black church culture might be bewildered by “What Had Happened Was,” especially at the way Foxx turns what’s billed as a stand-up routine into an hourlong testimony service about a God who’s good “all the time” and, in Foxx’s telling, exhibited that goodness by causing his brain to bleed.
The critic would have preferred that Foxx did more of a PSA on recognizing the symptoms of a stroke, saying that Foxx instead …
… provides a fascinating, if frustrating, example of Black folk theology by using his return to the stage to praise a God who sickens and immobilizes those he loves. And maybe prompts stroke patients in the audience to wonder if they, too, have offended the Almighty.
What Do Catholics Say About This?
Whether or not Foxx intended to say that God CAUSED his stroke (it’s a personal testimony and a comedy routine, so that’s up for interpretation), what do Catholics believe?
Let’s see that Saint John Paul II had to say:
Suffering and illness belong to the condition of man, a fragile, limited creature, marked by original sin from birth on. In Christ, who died and rose again, however, humanity discovers a new dimension to its suffering: instead of a failure, it reveals itself to be the occasion for offering witness to faith and love….
Illness and suffering no doubt remain a limit and a trial for the human mind. In the light of Christ’s Cross, however, they become a privileged moment for growth in faith and a precious instrument to contribute, in union with Jesus the Redeemer, to implementing the divine project of salvation. [#4]
— St. Pope John Paul II, in his message for the fifth World Day of the Sick in 1997.
Catholics don’t believe that God inflicts misfortune on His creatures, but His permissive will may allow it to happen. Then it’s up to the human to find a way to reconcile the event with his or her faith … and hopefully find meaning and enlightenment in suffering.
Suffering can also be united with that of Christ on the Cross, and offered up for the benefit of others. As Word on Fire explains:
But “offering it up” can speed this salvific action horizontally. Any such offering, even if it is initiated by a feeling of resigned helplessness, has the potential to unleash an expansive love upon the world. It cannot be otherwise. To offer one’s aches and pains, one’s disappointments, for the sake of others is always love-in-action; a redemptive act. There is a particularly true and hardy love that springs from an offering made for the intentions of another.
Foxx and His Family
In the special, Foxx reveals, powerfully and movingly, how he reconnected with a long-abandoned faith to come back to health. It also caused his relationships with his sister, and his two daughters, to intensify and deepen.
His oldest daughter, actress Corinne Foxx, introduces him at the beginning of the special (with the first of many, many expletives).
His younger daughter, teenage Anelise Bishop (the girls have different mothers, neither of whom Foxx married), who snuck into her father’s hospital room to play her guitar, appears onstage for a duet with him.
Should You Watch Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was … ?
The special reminded me of the 1982 comedy documentary, Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, in which the comedian turned the horrific experience of setting himself on fire while freebasing cocaine into a raw and raunchy, but side-splittingly funny, comedy routine.
If you can’t abide profanity, a certain amount of irreverance, or racially-tinged jokes, this special is NOT FOR YOU.
But I found it to not only be very funny but riveting and deeply moving. I only met Jamie Foxx once in my journalism career and found him charming (and very good at choosing cologne), but I didn’t really have a strong opinion of him before this, one way or the other.
And I didn’t know much about his personal life. FWIW, Wikipedia says he had a strong Baptist upbringing, and that spirituality comes through in the special. I make no warranties as to his spiritual life then or now or in the future, but if the testimony he gives in the special carries forward, he could be a powerful voice for faith in Christ.
The special already is.
Image: Parrish Lewis/Netflix © 2024
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