Are any of John’s and Lori’s actions forgivable because they were trying to protect Ryan? Any of their lies, their obfuscations, their mistruths? This is a town of people whose children have been taken from them as a result of drugs, poverty, lack of opportunity, mental illness. Ryan’s burst of angry violence, bullets from a police-issue gun being used to kill Erin, and that dead-eyed stare Lori gave Mare when she started repeating the lies John had told her to say. It was always John.Īt least, that’s what the episode wants you to believe for the first 45 minutes or so, and I’ll be honest: I felt pretty good in my sleuthing from last week! Billy innocent! John guilty! But shame on me for not picking up on the other intentional clues Mare of Easttown was laying down in preceding episodes. John is DJ’s father, and John and Erin began having sex after the family reunion, and Billy isn’t the responsible party at all - neither in impregnating Erin, nor in killing her. Back at the Easttown police station, we see the photo Jess had taken from Erin’s journal: a snapshot of Erin beside a sleeping John Ross. “Sacrament” begins right when “Sore Must Be the Storm” ended, with Mare tracking John and Billy to their father’s fishing spot. Can I muster much empathy up in my heart for John Ross, though? No. As a nonreligious person, I can also extend some appreciation for what Mare of Easttown hammers home in this finale about hope, confession, and forgiveness being the steps that guide us forward out of tragedy. “It’s not for us to decide whether or not they’re deserving,” Deacon Mark said to his congregation about the outsiders in their community, and I can admire the intentions behind that. But as a slight tipping of the scales? As a brief glimmer of a better future? Yes, and yes.
I’m not sure Lori and Mare’s friendship will ever fully be the same again. The Ross family is still torn apart by incest, lies, and abuse. Carrie is still slipping back into her addiction. I don’t think all of that, the broad scale and scope of it, gets fully better because Mare brought Katie and Missy home, or because she solved Erin’s murder. Civic and religious leaders betraying their constituents and their followers, and the mistrust and cynicism of those deceived constituents and followers spreading outward, generation by generation, fraying the invisible web of confidence and belief and compassion and altruism that is supposed to hold a community together.
Parents and children who can’t seem to stand each other, and neighbors turning on one another. Abusive family dynamics, wayward teenagers, drug addiction, abducted and murdered women, the men doing the abducting and the murdering. Thousands of years later, of the various Christian sacraments, confession and forgiveness remain of particular importance.įorgive my simplistic poetry and theology lessons, but I say all this because hope, confession, and forgiveness all entwine together in Easttown, don’t they? For the preceding six episodes, we’ve seen Easttown as a bleak, suffocating place. When the early followers of Christianity took the word over for their own purposes, they transformed its Roman definition into “the means whereby sacredness … is actualized,” Kristensen wrote. Brede Kristensen wrote of the Roman root word, “sacramentum,” which was a military oath and sacred bond.
In the 1960 book The Meaning of Religion: Lectures in the Phenomenology of Religion, W. In Christianity, a sacrament is an essential religious rite various branches of Christianity recognize different sacraments, but in general, they agree on the core idea that performing a sacrament can provide God’s grace.
In her poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” from which the sixth episode of Mare of Easttown took its title “Sore Must Be the Storm,” Emily Dickinson described hope as what “perches in the soul … sings the tune without the words/and never stops - at all.” The purity of hope, Dickinson suggested, was that it “never - in Extremity … asked a crumb - of me.” Hope exists for its own sake, and for our sake, and it pushes us ahead when nothing else can, or will.Ĭonsider that on one hand, and consider the word “Sacrament,” the title for Mare of Easttown’s finale episode, on the other.
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