Midnight Mass

 K This essay has a lot of spoilers. If you haven't watched every episode of Midnight Mass yet STOP and watch this show before continuing to read my blog post or any other commentary or reviews on this Netflix show.

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     Midnight Mass has been a very highly anticipated show for many horror fans like myself. Mike Flanagan has become one of my absolutely favorite directors.  This show surpassed by expectations and my husband and I discussed it quite a bit afterwards.

    At one point in time, I said “I think that this is the type of show many Christian clergy will be citing in some of their sermons.”  Let me take a few steps backwards, while my ideas and my life circumstances have changed significantly, I hold a masters degree in theology that I've never put to use. But as I keep thinking about this brilliant Netflix show, my theological background gives me some interesting perspectives on a few of the characters.

FATHER PAUL   

    Catholics believe in transubstantiation. This means that when they partake in the sacrament of Eucharist (which is also called Holy Communion) they believe that the bread and wine literally becomes the body and Christ.

    So, when Father Paul mixes his own blood with the wine that is believed to become the body of Christ, it is a very radical act. While he does believe that the creature that was responsible for the healing powers his own blood has is an angel, a messenger of God, he is still mixing his own blood with what he perceives to be Christ’s blood.  While he does believe that he has experienced the same type of miracle that Jesus must have had by dying and coming back to life, it is still blood that is dripping from his own human flesh. 

    This brings a lot of insight to his character on how he does rely on faith quite a bit because there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that this is indeed how Jesus Christ experienced his own miracles.  But even though I perceived the act of mixing his own blood with the Eucharistic wine as sinister at first, as time went on it was clear that he did it out of a love for the people and wanting to give them a chance at experiencing their own miracle.

    Father Paul was never interested in a power trip as much as he was interested in people, which was what made him so likeable. He and Riley have conflicting views about faith; however, Father Paul makes sure that he provides Riley the emotional support of an AA group. He is not perfect, as he goes ahead and kills Joe in his own hunger for blood.  

     But he would rather stay by the side of his former lover than judge people when Beverly wants him to help judge people in the community.  He proclaims, “its about God.” This act requires a lot of faith in a higher power in light of the pressures of a community wondering if and how it is going to survive.   

LEEZA

    True story: There was once a woman in her early 20s in my home congregation who had been confined to a wheelchair for a summer due to a horrific car accident.  The doctors told her she may never walk again…but she did. The first place she chose to walk in public was our church. While she did have a very talented team of doctors working with her at the Mayo Clinic, everyone in my congregation perceived her as a miracle and could not help but attest to the healing power of Christ when they witnessed her walking again.

    After this incident, I was often intrigued by how whenever stories of Jesus’s miracles are mentioned in the Bible we never hear about the characters again after that: like Jairus's Daughter and Lazarus.  They are treated like anecdotes for the biography of Jesus but how it effects their lives afterwards are never alluded to. 

    This is where Leeza’s character is really fascinating.  Even though her body is healed, she still harbored a lot of anger towards Joe Collie for shooting her as a child and causing her to be paralyzed. While she hears the story about forgiveness of Christ at church, she wants to grow in her faith in a way that she could forgive Joe for what he had done to her.  And what she says to him when she confronts him was one of the most authentic portrayals of the emotional complexity of forgiving someone that I have ever heard. 

    Then while her peers are very intrigued at her amazing physical recovery, she proceeds to lead a normal life of a teenager. Well, as normal as it can be for being in a character in a small-town horror movie that is.

    And  last line of the show… when she says “I can’t feel my legs,” it begs the question as to what was really happening to her body.  And like many of the characters who experienced healing in the Bible, I could not help but ask the kind of direction will her life take when she gets to the mainland?

BEVERLY

    Beverly would be very much like a Pharisee in the New Testament of the Bible. Pharisees were religious leaders who were very concerned with maintaining the Jewish traditions and the religious piety of the Jewish people.  Jesus does not think favorably of the Pharisees, often preaching against their intentions as he perceives them to fail to practice the adherence to the Jewish law that they preached.

    Beverly is very attentive to the liturgical calendar, the cycle the church uses throughout the year to indicate which days are Christian holidays, as she notes that the color of cloth that Father Paul wore at one point in time was not appropriate for that particular time in the church calendar. She knows her Bible forwards and backwards and is the only character in the series that actually cites biblical passages in conversation, even if she is choosing the verses that fit her own agenda. 

    I met a few people who were a lot like Beverly in my time serving churches, who were eager to use Bible verses against people in the community and who were more concerned about tradition than about people. These traits make her the most unlikeable character on the show.

     In the show’s masterful conclusion, she is the only one who does not actually sing the prayerful song with the rest of the community.  The concern she has is more about trying to find a way to escape, causing the question of how much she ever truly believed in God and how much she was just a show for the public persona that she had developed around trying to maintain the traditions of the church.

RILEY

    While he was religious when he was younger and served as an altar boy, he no longer embraces the concept of faith. He asks the critical questions that blind faith can not answer. He is much like the character of Thomas in the Bible. Thomas will not believe that Jesus had actually resurrected from the dead until he can see and touch Jesus’s wounds and is often referred to as “Doubting Thomas.” Thomas was the first agnostic in the best sense of the word as agnosticism is all about needing concrete evidence and asking critical questions.

    Riley's constant questioning propels his character. And it is his critical reasoning skills that makes him realize that Father Paul had been lying to him. The difficult questions that he asks Father Paul provides dialogue about the reasons why the life of faith can be hard to grapple with.  And when Erin asks him “What happens when we die,” he proceeds to enter into a monologue where a scientific explanation of what happens after death becomes poetic.

    But the brilliance of Flannagan’s characterization is that Riley’s cynicism comes from Riley’s own suffering. It came out of suffering and reflecting over his alcoholism that propelled him to murder a woman at the beginning of the show.

SHERIFF HASSAN—

     Sheriff Hassan is ostracized for practicing his Islamic faith privately while the rest of the community attends a Catholic church. I do not know as much about Islam as I should, but he is a wonderful example of being in relationship with people whose faith is different.

    When his son asks if he can go to the church, he does not lash out any judgement ideologically on the church. He just stresses that the Islamic faith is part of the culture that he has been a part of and that his deceased wife cherishes. He wants to maintain that cultural heritage. For him faith is about maintaining a connection to his wife and to the culture he was raised in.

     When he discovers his son is learning the Bible in school, he states that he is glad that his son is learning about it. He just stresses that it is a public school and that a diversity of perspectives should be acknowledged.

     The placement that he has in the community because of his community provokes the questions about how people, particularly Christians, interact with people that do not practice the same traditions as they do.  Sheriff Hassan shows more strength of character in terms of potentially being in dialogue than the rest of the community has of him. Admittingly, Rahul Kohli charmed me in his portrayal of this role quite a bit. 

MY FINAL REFLECTION—

    Erin and Riley’s parents are also strong characters in Midnight Mass that I know that I did not touch on.  But with the schedule that my day job and family life have given me I only have time to watch this amazing show just once for now. There are also many other ways of diving into this masterful show theologically and I am only just addressing a few with my brief reflections of Biblical characters and liturgical theology. 

    On a more deeply personal note: to make a long story short, religious material now has the potential of being very emotionally triggering for me and I no longer consider myself a Christian. However Flannigan has wonderfully complex characters that breathes a lot of humanity into these different concepts that I've discussed. This is one of the factors that made this show very bingeworthy. The way Chrisian worship is portrayed uplifts the beauty of the ritual while leaving the viewer open to their own personal interpretation of what may or may not actually occur in a Christian worship service. Regardless of my own disassociation with Christianity the soundtrack to this show is amazing, showing that hymns are beautiful when they are performed with excellence. Watching this show is the closest that I will get to a Christian worship service for a long time. But I know I will revisit the show.