“Every place I was before where I am now, well, they were just leading me here.”
My father once told me I was baptized Catholic “for the party.”
Nobody in my family had much use for organized religion, save for my grandfather, and even he only occasionally went to church. He did pray, however, and carried a set of rosary beads, and crossed himself whenever he drove past a Catholic church. An odd, superstitious child already, I picked up on these little habits, and developed a unhealthy fear of God and the Devil before I was even a teenager.
Some of it was due to pop culture: this was, after all, the era of The Exorcist, which ushered in a whole new horror movie genre in demonic possession. But a lot of it was just me, deeply anxious for reasons I couldn’t articulate, always feeling guilty about something, even if I wasn’t sure what it was. I was the world’s smallest penitent, beating myself with an invisible flail.
When I was 15 or so, after my parents’ extremely acrimonious1 divorce and when I chose to live with my father, he decided we needed to start going to church. Not a Catholic church, mind you, but a fundamentalist Christian church, the kind that believed in faith healing and speaking in tongues. Decades later I still don’t know why he chose that particular church. As far as I knew, he was an atheist, and would have normally found the idea of attending a church that was a step away from handling rattlesnakes laughable.
But we went, every Sunday, for over a whole year. We even attended Bible study classes2, and to this day the idea of my father at a Bible study is hilarious to me, like picturing a gorilla at a tea party. I didn’t like it much — the people were snobby, the pastor (as expected) talked about needing money more than anything else — and though it presented the idea of a loving God (as long as you gave your 10% every week), I still felt like I was stuck in an eternal loop of failing Him, somehow.
We stopped going to the Christian church after the pastor spoke about a parishioner who had been arrested for child molestation, suggesting that we should pray for him rather than his victim. Shortly after that, I became close friends with two people who were both raised in super-Catholic “fish on Fridays” homes3, and I used this as an opportunity to re-embrace my Catholic roots. In fact, I dove in whole-heartedly, going to church every Sunday, learning how to say the rosary, even making my First Communion and Confirmation, albeit years overdue. I attended adult Sunday school, just so I could catch up with everything. I even volunteered to work at church carnivals, and went to gatherings for other good little teen Catholics.
For a while, I loved it. It felt like just where I needed to be. The primary tenet of Catholicism is constant, crushing guilt, so it was perfect for me. You don’t question God’s plan, even if it seems cruel and unjust. You don’t ask “What have I done to deserve this,” because you already know what you did. You were born, and that was enough.
Eventually, however, I even fell away from that, though it was less the guilt and more that I couldn’t logically parse being both anti-birth control and anti-abortion, or why it was necessary to have a middle man between you and God when it came to confessing your sins, since God was supposedly always watching you anyway. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any kind of organized religion in my life. I would never call myself an atheist, however, even though a very wise person once told me I’d be happier if I were. It’s probably true: you can’t feel like you’re a failure in the eyes of something that doesn’t exist. My relationship with God now is complicated, and I dislike and distrust anyone who thinks they have all the answers about it, regardless of their belief (or lack thereof). I wish every day that I had some guidance.
Who knows, maybe I need a Father Paul.
This is an extremely roundabout way to get into episode 2 of Midnight Mass, which opens with Crockett Island’s shoreline littered with dead, mangled cats, and introduces the audience to most of the other key players in the story. On the scene is Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli), relatively new in town and treated with polite distance by the other townspeople, save for schoolteacher and St. Patrick’s deaconess Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan), who constantly looks at him like he just shit his pants in her presence.
But we’ll get to Bev later.
Wade Scarborough4 (Michael Trucco), the Mayor of Crockett Island (a position one gets the impression was foisted upon him rather than chosen), uses the event at the beach to encourage Sheriff Hassan to attend services at St. Patrick’s, ignoring the fact that Hassan is a practicing Muslim. Wade is cheerful in his persuasiveness (they always are, at first), suggesting that it would simply be easier to go to church on the island, rather than travel by ferry to the mainland for the nearest mosque.
Also forced to travel to the mainland for spiritual guidance is Riley (Zach Gilford), because that’s where his court-mandated A.A. meetings are. While he complies, it’s clear from his visible discomfort that he’s not getting what he’s supposed to out of A.A.’s jumbled philosophy of a “higher power.” He’s not getting what he needs anywhere, as he’s haunted by a recurring dream of sitting on a boat adrift at sea, where even there the ghost of Tara-Beth sits across him with cold regard on what remains of her ruined face.
“You found your purpose.”
Riley does find a kindred spirit in Erin (Kate Siegel), his old friend, who’s treating her reluctant return to Crockett Island with quiet, pragmatic dignity and grace. Erin, who originally left to try to make it as an actor, has been forced by her circumstances to move back to her childhood home and take the same job her late, alcoholic mother held for many years, but the way she sees it, it’s an unexpected fork in the road of life. She’s having a baby, it’s up her to keep moving forward and do the best she can with what she has, as she tries to encourage Riley to do the same.
An unforeseen bright light in all this is Father Paul (Hamish Linklater), who, despite it being a temporary assignment, seems to be giving his all in revitalizing everyone’s spirituality. He pays a visit to town doctor Sarah Gunn (Annabeth Gish), and offers at-home communion to her elderly, ailing mother Mildred (Alex Essoe), who initially mistakes him for Monsignor Pruitt. Sarah is touched by Father Paul’s gentleness with Mildred, even if Sarah personally finds him a little unnerving, pointing out to a girlfriend later at a town picnic that he stares at her in the same way Monsignor Pruitt used to, not necessarily with menace but some ill-defined interest.
However, it’s the Sunday services where Father Paul really shines. In a time when men of the cloth are far more likely to preach doom and gloom (because that’s what makes the money roll in, you see), Father Paul’s sermons are rooted in hope and redemption. He speaks of rising from the ashes and still making something good and worthwhile of the lives we were given, even if it wasn’t what we initially wanted. It’s clear from the looks on the faces of the few remaining parishioners that they desperately need to hear this, when it feels like Crockett Island is all but about to crumble into the ocean.
Even Riley, the dedicated non-believer, is stirred, and gives in to his mother’s wish that he both take communion, and be marked with the cross symbolizing Ash Wednesday, one of the holiest days in the Easter holiday season, appropriately the season that represents rebirth. After a conversation with Father Paul at the town picnic, Riley agrees to his suggestion that they hold A.A. meetings there on the island. It may just be Riley in attendance at first, but Father Paul suggests that eventually more people will come, inspired by Riley’s recovery. It’s a chance to do good, the tantalizing promise of a second chance, that Riley finds irresistible.
The festive, hopeful mood of the town picnic comes to an end upon the anguished wails of Joe Collie (Robert Longstreet), the town drunk and local pariah after accidentally shooting and paralyzing Leeza Scarborough (Annarah Shephard), Wade’s teenage daughter. Joe’s beloved dog, Pike, has immediately fallen ill and dies an unpleasant death right there at the picnic. Perhaps he got into something, Sheriff Hassan suggests, or (as we mostly already know) maybe someone slipped Pike some poison-laced food, out of some belief that Joe isn’t suffering enough for his actions. There are some people, you see, who believe themselves to be God’s designated hand of justice, and delve it out wherever they see fit.
Though most of the town is there when it happens, Pike’s death goes largely unremarked upon, as does the disappearance of Bowl, the town weed guy, who’s lured into an abandoned house and doesn’t come back out. It’s just another day on Crockett Island. People are there one day and gone the next, probably to find a better life on the mainland. Dogs get into things and they die. That pot of water isn’t boiling just yet.
“The only thing, the only fucking things that lets people stand by, watching all this suffering, doing nothing, doing fucking nothing, is the idea that suffering can be a gift from God.”
Riley attends the first A.A. meeting with Father Paul in the church rec center, its vast emptiness more disheartening than comforting. The one-on-one encounter, during which Father Paul mostly just quietly, impassively listens, is more like a therapy session, and Riley treats it as such. He unloads with his feelings about organized religion, specifically Catholicism, and the concept that there’s grace in suffering. Let’s not forget the idea that there’s a higher meaning in Tara-Beth’s death, or Leeza Scarborough’s crippling injury. It may not be for you to know, but just trust that it’s there, and that’s how you’re supposed to not spend the rest of your life raging at the heavens about it.
Even worse, far too many people rely on such a baffling concept mostly to absolve themselves of having to help those who are suffering. Who are we to interfere in God’s plan, even if that plan is vague and elliptical? This is something I’ve always had trouble grasping too: where is the comfort in “it was God’s will”? How does that make tragedy, pain, suffering bearable? When people say that to someone who’s lost a child, or found out their cancer is terminal, or lost everything they owned in a fire, do they believe it, and do they think they’re helping?
Father Paul, for his part, listens to Riley, without arguing with him. He agrees that “God’s will” doesn’t absolve people of their responsibility in a situation. But he also believes that something good can come out of suffering and heartache, some small flame that guides us in the darkness.
He tests that theory out at the next church service, when he coaxes Leeza Scarborough out of her wheelchair. To the parishioners (including Leeza’s parents), it at first looks like Father Paul is mocking her, holding a Communion wafer just out of her reach. But it works: almost as if she’s being pulled on invisible strings, Leeza rises up and steps forward, as wobbly as a fawn, accepting Communion on her own two feet. Not even Riley, looking on in stunned disbelief, has an explanation for that one.
Like, I’m honestly surprised they didn’t end up killing each other.
Where I learned to speak in tongues, which is essentially a trick: you just repeat the same phrase over and over until it sounds like you’re babbling, and supposedly God will take over at some point.
I still am close friends with them, although funnily enough none of us practice anymore.
I’ve seen Wade described elsewhere as “sexy Ned Flanders,” and honestly, whoever came up with that is not wrong.