This essay contains spoilers for Season 3 of “The White Lotus.”
The riveting season finale of “The White Lotus,” a series that focuses on the travails of wealthy people vacationing at a luxury hotel chain, was notable for its gimlet-eyed focus on the importance of choices in life. (Spoiler alert: I’m about to reveal the denouements of many of the characters.)
This season, several characters were faced with choices that could affect the rest of their lives. The underlying spiritual focus of the show was telegraphed by frequent references to Buddhist practices in Thailand (and visits to a Buddhist monastery), where this season was set.
In the tradition of Ignatian spirituality, each of us is called to weigh what St. Ignatius Loyola called various “spirits”: the “good spirit,” which comes from God and moves us toward God, and the “evil spirit,” which moves us away from God. These are not to be thought of as ghosts per se, but as voices and impulses that come from within us: one from God and one not from God. (Ignatius identifies the evil spirit as coming from Satan.) Other people in our lives can also give voice to those impulses and can help sway us in one direction or the other.
Choosing between those spirits and coming to good decisions is a process called discernment. Last night’s episode was a classic example of discernment, even though the characters (or the show’s creator, Mike White) may not have used this language.
To take just a few examples, Belinda had to decide if she was going to accept millions of dollars from the evil Greg (a.k.a. Gary) who arranged for the murder of his wealthy wife (and Belinda’s client) Tanya last season. Belinda’s son, Zion, acted as her business advisor in drawing up a deal, in which Greg essentially bought her silence. Belinda has been among the most sympathetic characters in the series: kind, soft-spoken, generous. But in the finale, she embraces her desire to be financially successful, not only accepting ill-gotten gains, but throwing aside a Thai friend and potential business partner in her quest for success.
Belinda is not the only one to face life-changing choices. Despite his girlfriend’s advice to remain calm, Rick suddenly and cold-bloodedly murders Jim, who Rick had suspected of murdering his father, but who turns out, Darth-Vader-like, to be Rick’s father. Likewise, Gaitok, the soft-spoken hotel security guard, must decide, on the spur of the moment, if he will shoot Rick, while Jim’s wife (who also owns the hotel) shouts, “Shoot him!” Gaitok does, killing both Rick and his kind-hearted girlfriend Chelsea, upending Gaitok’s deeply held Buddhist beliefs but winning the affection of his girlfriend, who likes him only when he’s “confident.”
But the decision that moved me the most—and a textbook example of discernment—was that of Piper, the daughter of the finance executive Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) and his Lorazepam-popping wife, Victoria (Parker Posey). The Ratliffs (a Dickensian name if there ever was one) have come to Thailand not simply for a vacation, but so that Piper might finish her thesis on Buddhism. In the middle of this season, Piper confesses to her horrified parents that what she really wants is to join the local monastery for a year. Her brother decides to join her for an overnight stay.
Her parents, appalled by her decision and genuinely concerned for her welfare, decide to visit the monastery and interrogate the abbot. (“He’d better be the best Buddhist in China!” says Victoria, hilariously forgetting where she is.) During their stay, the paterfamilias meets with the abbot, who gives him sage advice about surrender, freedom and peace. (St. Ignatius would have approved of most of it.)
Piper’s overnight stay in the monastery is not what she expected; the next day she confesses to her parents her frustration in a remarkable and remarkably acted scene. Piper realizes that she needs creature comforts, and this realization—that she is not just spoiled but incapable of living simply—disgusts her.
This is what spiritual writers call “compunction”—the often painful awareness of one’s own sinfulness. Now, one can certainly forgive Piper. I don’t know many people (including myself) who would want to sleep on stained sheets and eat unappetizing food for a year. But what she is experiencing is, perhaps for the first time in her life, a sense of the sinfulness we all share in.
“There’s so much suffering in the world and we have it so easy and other people have it so hard,” she says through tears. “I feel like it’s really unfair. And I just feel really bad.” Here is where discernment comes in. Piper has a choice, and a potentially life-changing one. On the one hand, she can say to herself, “I may not be able to spend a year in this monastery, but this new understanding makes me want to live more simply, live a life less focused on creature comforts and perhaps even share my wealth with the poor.” In her tearful confession is real awareness, perhaps of the kind she found so appealing in the Buddhist monks she met.
Her mother, however, wants nothing to do with that. It is a threat to her lifestyle, her very way of being in the world. So Victoria, sweetly but brutally, voices what Ignatius would call the “evil spirit.” She is concerned with her daughter’s well-being, but she also has a “disordered attachment” to wealth, having earlier confessed she couldn’t imagine living without money.
So she turns on the convincing charm. In Ignatian spirituality, the evil spirit sometimes works like a “drop of water on a sponge” for the person going from bad to worse. In other words, the evil spirit says, “Don’t worry about living selfishly. Everyone does it.” This is exactly what Piper’s mom says, in her honeyed Southern drawl. In a few minutes, Piper’s recognition has been set aside, thanks to her mother. She will not live a simpler life. The flame of compunction, which could have led to a more loving, more charitable, more independent life, has been extinguished.
This is underlined by a quick scene in the hotel’s jewelry shop (the site of a vicious burglary a few episodes ago) in which her mother encourages Piper to pick out a new piece of jewelry to help her feel better.
“The White Lotus” is not the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius or The Cloud of Unknowing. It’s entertainment. And it’s often quite funny—mainly thanks to Parker Posey’s affected drawl and malapropisms. But in its examination of what Jesus called in the Gospels the “lure of wealth,” it brilliantly shows that while there are many things we cannot control (the final show is called “Amor Fati,” or love of fate), we are free to make choices for both good and ill. To quote another piece of popular fare, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” Piper chose poorly.
