Davis Quick Dry

[Vira Bhakta]

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See my write-ups on Abraham, the Friend of God, Prophet Joseph, The Kingdom of Solomon, Saint Mary, and Jesus, the Spirit of God, which range in length from a single paragraph on the Abraham film to a 22-part series of blog posts on the Joseph TV series.

Before I watched this series\u2014which finished its first and possibly only season last Thursday\u2014all I knew about it was that it had something to do with a nun fighting an all-powerful artificial intelligence, and that it was being billed as \u201Can exploration of faith versus technology\u2014an epic battle of biblical and binary proportions.\u201D

But the show turned out to be a lot, lot stranger than that. It\u2019s a really goofy grab-bag of seemingly random elements: a quest to destroy the Holy Grail, a hyper-violent shoe commercial, an imprisoned Pope, a Vegas-style magic show, a professor named Schrodinger (who, yes, has a cat)\u2026 they\u2019re all part of the mix.

And the series takes the notion that nuns are brides of Christ very literally, as the show\u2019s main character\u2014Sister Simone\u2014periodically meets Jesus (aka \u201CJay\u201D) in some sort of parallel spiritual dimension for falafel and conjugal visits.

I could barely get a handle on it all, and ordinarily I would have let the series pass without comment. But then something happened in Episode 7 that took this show to a new level, for me\u2014not to the extent that I want to write about the series as a whole, but I do at least want to note a few extraordinary elements in that episode.

Specifically\u2014and for reasons too convoluted to get into here\u2014there comes a point where Sister Simone has to go into the belly of a whale to retrieve the Holy Grail, and she does this while wearing a diving suit called a \u201CLazarus Shroud\u201D, to protect her from the whale\u2019s stomach acid.

At one point in the gospels, Jesus explicitly compares the three days that he will spend in the tomb to the three days that Jonah spent in the belly of the great fish (Matthew 12:40; cf Jonah 1:17). I have often heard people talk about this passage, but I can\u2019t recall ever seeing it dramatized in any significant way onscreen before. The word-for-word adaptations of Matthew produced by The Visual Bible and The Lumo Project include that line as part of their dialogue, of course, but they don\u2019t dwell on it at all. Neither does Pier Paolo Pasolini in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).

SIMONE: Is he dead?

MARY: Yes, but also no. My son is there (looks at enshrouded body), and here (looks at baby in her arms). Both alive and dead at the same time.

SIMONE: How is he\u2014 and you\u2014

MARY: Simone, please, there\u2019s much to explain, but right now your body is passing through the whale\u2019s intestinal tract, approaching the Grail. And if you\u2019re going to destroy it, you need to understand. This place is a tomb\u2014his tomb. This is where I sat with him, for three awful days, long after he had turned cold. It is where my grief turned to anger, leading me to make my greatest mistake. When I learned the Romans were coming to take my son, the sadness I felt, knowing I would never hold my baby again\u2014it destroyed all logic and reason. I took a part of him for myself, the part where I used to kiss him when he was a child. (kisses baby\u2019s head) And I preserved it with pitch and amber, and turned it into a bowl.

SIMONE: The Holy Grail is Jay\u2019s [i.e. Jesus\u2019s] skull?

MARY: You must think this is sick. How could you not? But mothers do insane things out of love for their children.

Mary goes on to explain that Jesus has been tethered to this world by the Grail for the past two thousand years\u2014stuck in a sort of limbo, the very limbo where Simone has been meeting him for their conjugal visits\u2014and she says Simone needs to \u201Cdestroy the last remaining piece of him on Earth\u201D so that his spirit can finally be set free.

There are so, so, so many things \u201Cwrong\u201D with that dialogue\u2014so many ways it deviates from the biblical and traditional narratives\u2014that it feels kind of ridiculous to even think about taking it seriously enough to nit-pick.

No, neither Mary nor anyone else stayed with Jesus in the tomb. (There is only one gospel that places Mary at the crucifixion of Jesus\u2014John\u2019s gospel\u2014and even that one doesn\u2019t give her any role in the burial of Jesus.)

No, the body of Jesus was not taken apart, least of all by his mother, and there are no \u201Cpieces of him on Earth\u201D holding him back from the afterlife. (The fact that Jesus rose from the dead and transcended earthly limitations is kind of central to the whole idea of Christianity.)

Well, okay, here I have to admit that I don\u2019t know all that much about Grail lore, and for all I know, there may be some sort of basis for the Grail-skull link here. Maybe there is some pagan, pre-Christian version of Grail lore that the series is tapping into. Or maybe there is some other myth, legend, or scholarly hypothesis that the writers had in mind.1 I don\u2019t know. Feel free to let me know in the comments.

What I do know is that I can handle a lot of weird stuff\u2014I could roll with the show\u2019s very literalistic take on nuns being married to Christ, for example\u2014but any story predicated on the notion that the Virgin Mary cracked her own son\u2019s skull open while his body was still newly buried in the tomb just loses me. Utterly loses me.

Anyway. I figured some people might be interested in knowing about this aspect of the show, if they hadn\u2019t heard about it yet; and I wondered if anyone might know something more about Grail lore that would help to illuminate this scene for me. So I\u2019m writing this post and tossing it out there, just for the record.

The Virgin Mary is played in this scene by Shohreh Aghdashloo, an Oscar-nominated actress (for 2003\u2019s House of Sand and Fog) who might be best-known now for playing the foul-mouthed UN Secretary-General Chrisjen Avasarala in all six seasons of the excellent sci-fi series The Expanse.

Aghdashloo, who is of Iranian descent, previously played Mary\u2019s kinswoman Elizabeth in 2006\u2019s The Nativity Story\u2014and I interviewed her on the junket for that film, and it was through our interview that I first learned about Iranian Bible movies, which have since become something of an interest of mine.2

One of my favorite Orthodox icons is the one that shows the \u201Cdormition\u201D, or death, of Mary. In it, the disciples gather to pay their respects\u2014and Jesus stands behind them all, holding Mary\u2019s soul, which is wrapped in swaddling clothes like an infant. Just as Mary once welcomed Jesus into her world, so now Jesus welcomes her into his.

Instead of Jesus holding a sort of infant Mary while standing next to the adult Mary\u2019s body, the scene from Mrs Davis shows Mary holding the infant Jesus while standing next to the adult Jesus\u2019 body.

Instead of suggesting that the deceased person is progressing on her spiritual journey\u2014by embarking on a phase of it that is so new to her she approaches it like a child, with infinite room to grow3\u2014the scene in Mrs Davis suggests that the deceased person has regressed on some level, because his mother simply can\u2019t let him go.

A quick Google turns up an article on a Knights Templar website which claims that Grail lore \u201Cis intimately connected with legends involving severed heads\u201D. Incidentally, Googling the words \u201Cgrail\u201D and \u201Cskull\u201D turns up quite a few pages about Indiana Jones\u2014because, of course, Jones has encountered both the Holy Grail and Crystal Skulls in his adventures. He was also forced to drink from a severed head in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

The economic recession resulted in millions of working Americans losing their jobs through no fault of their own. With economic conditions making it difficult for these Americans to find their next job opportunity, the Democratic Congress quickly responded by extending unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, establishing generous temporary UI benefit programs, and providing States incentive payments to modernize and improve access to UI systems.

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