Dreaming Too Small

“As you know, queens are chosen by God, so I happen to know heaven is a beautiful place, much better than any castle. It’s filled with wonderful food and dancing, and your mother will be there, and she will pick you up and hold you tight and never let you go, and once you are with her, nothing can ever hurt you, and you will never feel afraid or alone again.”

Reign S4 E7, ‘Hanging Swords’ (2017)

Not massively related to the post as a whole, but it fitted the title and dreamcatchers are well pretty.

Well, it’s taken me a little while, but I have now finished watching the whole of all four series of  Reign, a drama about Mary Queen of Scots that hardly deserves to be called historical, but is frequently very good fun.¹ Like many television serials whose overarching plotlines include events that are somehow established or canonical – whether by factual history or by popular legend – Reign started very slowly, and then everything seemed to start happening at once. Plausibility of characters and events was sacrificed for the sake of keeping the plot moving, though for some reason a rather excessive volume of slightly pointless subplots was also maintained. In any case, the result is that the viewer ends up far less invested in these later, hurried, chaotic storylines than in the more carefully-crafted stuff of the earlier episodes. Certainly I think it would be a rare Reign fan who would ship Mary with any of her later romantic interests more heartily than with her first love Francis.

And so it was, in some ways, not much of a surprise when, at the very end of the final episode – here be spoilers; proceed at your own risk – we flash forward to see Mary’s eventual execution by the reluctant order of her cousin Elizabeth I, the compensatory happy ending we get after the axe falls is her afterlife reunion with Francis.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he tells her.

“Is this real?” she wants to know.

“Nothing is more real,” he assures her. Then, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she replies.

She starts to tell him how difficult it’s been, but he shushes her: “That’s over now.” And they go running merrily over green countryside together and then there’s a montage of key moments from the past four series that basically sketches out the whole of Mary’s story as it was delivered to us, and yes I did cry a little bit.

Interestingly enough, the creators of Reign actually paint a pretty consistent picture of what might be in store for someone after she departs this earthly existence. My opening quotation is from a speech that the serial’s portrayal of Elizabeth makes to the terminally ill daughter of her trusted adviser and friend (and later lover) Gideon – a totally different context within the world of the show, and yet the idea of the afterlife contained in it comprises the same three key features: it will be a very nice place; all the unpleasantness of life as we know it (fear and loneliness and difficulty and so on) will be over; and, above all, one will be reunited with loved ones that have already died.

Of course, Reign is far from the only bit of fiction in which heaven is painted thus. There are probably more examples out there than anyone cares to name. What more, after all, could one want? What possible improvement could one make on this picture?

Well, there’s a hint of an answer to that question in Mary’s last words before she put her head on the block: “I put my trust in you, my Lord.” I’d hazard these were a variation on the real last words of the real Mary Queen of Scots, “in manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum,” that is, “Into your hands, Lord, I commit my spirit.”² If these words sounds familiar, incidentally, that’s probably because they’re almost identical to the last words of Jesus as recorded by Luke: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” he said,³ which of course comes out in Latin as “Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum,”⁴ so you can bet that’s what the real Mary was copycatting. But going back to the fictional Mary of Reign, her last thought before death was that she was trusting her Lord – and yet, in the fictional heaven that followed, her Lord was nowhere to be found. Frankly, if I were Mary, I’d be blooming disappointed.

 

Apparently, it took three blows to get the real Mary’s head off.

In the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the community of believers in Jesus at Philippi, when he agonises over whether life or death is the more preferable option, the whole of the argument in favour of death consists of the fact that dying enables one to be with Christ:

If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again.⁵

The importance of the work to which God has called him, the edification of his brothers and sisters, and the glory of Christ all stack up on the side of remaining alive, and consequently there’s no question for Paul – or for us – that that’s the better option, until such time as the Lord should will to take us to himself. But on the side of not remaining alive is nothing except the simple statement that it’s far better to be with Christ. Granted, it’s true enough, as per the Reign portrayal of heaven, that it will be a wonderful place, and that there will be an end to everything that’s bad about this world, and that if our departed loved ones have died trusting Jesus, we can expect to be reunited with them. But Paul isn’t particularly interested in any of that – at least, not for its own sake, detached from the central issue that he will get to be with Christ. Christ who has existed in perpetual perfect love with the other members of the Godhead from eternity. Christ through whom were created all things that have been created. Christ who humbled himself from the throne of the universe to become part of that creation. Christ who lived the morally faultless life no other human could manage. Christ who, while we were his enemies, took the blame for all our wrongdoing and corruption and was punished for it in our stead. Christ who killed death and rose in victory over everything evil. Christ who sits in glory as the heir of the universe. Christ to whom authority over everything in heaven and earth has been given. Christ who sent his Spirit to enable us to turn to him and receive new life, and to empower us to do what he and the Father would have us do. Christ who pleads our case in the heavenly courtroom. Christ who has promised to return one day to do away with all that’s wrong with the world and inaugurate a perfect new creation.⁶

I could go on, but hopefully the point is already clear: Christ is literally the best thing that has ever existed ever, and the promise of being with him is what really makes heaven worth looking forward to. The creators of Reign are dreaming too small. What could be better than a wonderful place where there is no more suffering and one is reunited with lost loved ones? The answer is a place that has Jesus in it – and then you get the rest into the bargain. Much as the creators of Reign tried to write their heroine a happy ending, placing her in the best version of an afterlife they could come up with, they cheated her out of the very thing that really makes the next life far better than this one: they cheated her out of her Lord.

Footnotes

¹ You can get the whole thing on Netflix; if I can hyperlink properly, this should be the first episode: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80010500?trackId=200257859.

² I must admit I’m trusting Wikipedia on that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Queen_of_Scots.

³ Check it out: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+23&version=ESVUK.

⁴ I checked the Vulgate (the extremely influential Latin translation of the scriptures made by Jerome in the late fourth century) and everything: http://vulgate.org/nt/gospel/luke_23.htm.

⁵ It’s the famous ‘to live is Christ and to die is gain’ passage: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians+1&version=ESVUK.

⁶ Yeah, I’m not going to reference all of those. Just, like, read the Bible, guys.