Who is to say...
This article is best enjoyed whilst listening to the song "Abide With Me" by The Newton Brothers https://youtu.be/6Uk3x9vDCMo
I recently was convinced by a dear friend, IB, to see a show on Netflix called "Midnight Mass" starring Hamish Linklater, Samantha Sloyan, Kate Siegel, Zach Gilford, and a host of other amazing actors. I was skeptical because the miniseries was deemed a horror flick and I do not like horror so much. In fact, I should be completely honest and say I spook easily, so the horror genre is never my go-to movie or TV series recommendation. But my dear friend convinced me that I would love this one because as he puts it, in terms of horror, this was the creator, Mike Flanagan's least scary project. Well, he convinced me with that last bit (no he did not!). Curious to know what all the fuss is about, I decided to watch it.
Well, if you are reading this, then I am about to do what my friend did for me and on the one hand, use this article to convince you to go see the miniseries on Netflix. The musical score is amazing. Kudos to The Newton Brothers for such hauntingly pleasing music that is a compilation of famous Christian hymns. Nevertheless, the focus of this article on the other hand would be to express my on-the-spot thoughts about how this series hits at a fundamental emotion that is the backbone of religious ideologies: hope.
I know, trust me. I know for a fact just how vital hope is to every one of us and how for some of us, it has been the one thing that keeps us going in our darkest time. However, when you watch the series (some spoilers from this point on), you would be in awe of the way two of the main characters, Father Paul and Beverly Keane were able to use the scripture to sleekly justify their insane actions and ideals even when those around them could clearly see the ridiculousness of it all. In fact, I personally believe that reason alone – of how easy there is a scripture verse in the bible or the Quran that justifies even the most insane of actions like rape or mass murder, or even racial discrimination – is one of the many reasons why religion as a concept, should be feared and all of its seemingly ennobling motives should be hugely scrutinized, especially by those who hold its statutes to lofty heights.
And I know most Christians after seeing the series and witnessing the events that unfolded would be quick to say stuff like, "I could never be that naive or gullible...", but the truth is that you could though – and chances are you are too. The fact is that a lot of us (religious and non-religious folks alike) always claim to have some sort of mental autonomy that we feel we can call upon like the Avengers that would come defend our senses and sensibilities from being manipulated in situations like what unfolded in the series. However, we must remember that we live in a world that is strongly governed by the ideology of "groupthink" and truth is, a concept like religion encourages, in a more profound form, a lot of groupthink mentality. Therefore, chances are that even in the real world, when faced with the situations that most of the characters of Crockett Island encountered, very few people would have willingly opted out of taking a cup of rat poison just so they can be resurrected, especially when they see that everyone else was doing it. It is for this reason that a lot of us irreligious folks always go on and on about how the religious folks should "unlearn shit" and we say this because we know just how detrimental some of the shit religions have taught us can be. Yes, unlearn shit when it comes to religion. Unlearn its insane ideologies. Indeed, you are free to find God in your own way but never by the confines of the many contradictions and ambiguities of a religious text; so much of which is clearly riddled in ridiculousness.
The character, Beverly Keane, who I strongly believe was the show's main antagonist after the Priest, Father Paul, was so convinced that she was pure and on some sort of divine assignment of which God was speaking through her, that no one else mattered to her. Every other person was just too much of a sinner, blinded by the filth of their own sins and transgressions to see the glory of God and the revelations of his presence. I bet you if you take a minute to look around your community, you will easily find a Beverly Keane there as well. In fact, I still can wrap my head around the fact that the entire congregation at Crockett Island besides being frozen in utter dread, did nothing when they saw a hideous creature walk into the church with bat-like wings and a vampiric thirst for blood but instead chose to listen to the inane explanation offered by their Priest who was able to somehow convince them that their fear was normal because as he put it, every angelic encounter in the bible had been accompanied by biblical characters who froze in fear when they encountered an angel, thus, the need for such angels to comfort them by saying "Fear not". Now, while the Priest’s justification about biblical characters freezing in fear when they saw angels, might seem accurate, it isn't because what the Priest failed to acknowledge to his congregation was the fact that contrary to what he claimed, these people did not freeze out of fear but out of dread – a very different emotion on its own. And unlike the biblical characters who encountered angels (angels whose demeanors, though otherworldly, was still quite comforting, same as the messages they were often sent to deliver) this creature Father Paul referred to as an angel spoke no words, had no comforting demeanor, and yet, although deeply dreadful of this creature, the congregation never questioned their dread. They simply accepted the justification their Priest offered because in that situation, doing otherwise would have meant being ostracized as being skeptical of the blessings of God, most likely by someone like Beverly Keane.
Imagine being so convinced of finding hope that you lose the ability to be rational and listen to your gut feeling. Yeah, imagine that. And I type this knowing fully well that even I an unbeliever and self-proclaimed rational mind, I am wont of falling into this entrapment of hope more times than I would care to count or even acknowledge.
Hope, in my opinion, is more blinding and potentially can be more dangerous than love when set towards the wrong purpose. And I believe this is true mostly because we have been led to believe that hope speaks more purely to our intentions as a collective than love does. Love is often individualized and more self-centric and so it is assumed and wildly believed that it can be easily tainted (or so we think). Hope, however...nah. Hope ideally is one of the strongest emotional forces that we have come to depend on for some sort of sustenance; something that keeps us going even in our darkest times. As such, for most of us, there is no way we can even slightly be convinced that it isn't borne of something pure – something transcendental. No way.
But sadly, we forget that even more than love, hope is one of the easiest emotions and states of mind to manipulate. On the one hand, Love mostly gets strengthened with affirmations. We fall in love with someone we can see and attributes or character traits that we can easily identify with. We feel loved when our loved ones express acts that we believe show that they put our needs above anyone else’s. On the other hand, Hope doesn't need that sort of affirmative strengthening to foster and grow. Hope simply looks around and seeks out whatever it deems worthy evidence (even those not there) to build its strength and validate its disposition. It is almost often self-reliant on the many connections it can make with respect to the visible realities and the metaphysical. And the sad truth is that anyone who knows where exactly to plant little seedlings of this incredible but volatile emotion called "hope" can and often wields the power to control the multitude. Biblically, Jesus did it: The hope of the second coming. In Islam, the Prophet Mohammad (SAW) and his many teachings hinge heavily on the reiteration of hope of "Jannah".
It does go without saying that one cannot wholly just dismiss religion as unimportant simply because there are fanatics who are hell-bent (pun intended) on invoking their definition of heaven's will on others. But fundamentally, religion stems from a deeply seated need for humans to ascribe meaning and significance to our existence that exceeds this three-dimensional plane of reality that makes up most of our visible universe. And in all honestly, the agnostic in me would agree that who is to say there isn't some entity out there – outside our plane of physical and metaphysical comprehension – that is much more powerful and can bend the will of the elements of our world to whatever their preferred mental disposition at the time is (this is for those who believe Natural disasters are from God). Who is to say there isn't an entity that can grant us the gift of de-aging or has the power to undo the genetic bonds of the many infirmities that continues to plague humankind? But the more you think of this “entity” in such a sense, the more it sounds like an alien from a comic superhero flick than an all-knowing deity that actually gives a hoot about humanity.
Sadly, who is also to say that this entity – or whatever your religion wants to call it – isn’t just a cynical being, solely after satisfying its own predilections and lust and hunger just like the monster "angel" that the congregation is introduced to in the penultimate episode of the miniseries Midnight Mass. And who is to say that we, just like the congregation at St. Patrick’s on Crockett Island, are simply so blinded by our need for hope, encouraged by religion's many masterful strokes of manipulation, that we are interpreting this entity's basic instincts and predilections for sorrow and tragedy to mean something more than it is. Who is to say that what we want to believe strongly is divinity isn’t simply just an otherworldly species seeking out its own survival in a dog-eat-dog cosmos and we, sadly, are its very accepting prey?
But then again, who is to say Midnight Mass isn’t just a TV series, and I, as someone who enjoyed it deeply isn’t simply “hoping” to make connections that aren’t necessarily there.
Well written...
I'm in awe, to say the least.