The hidden messages in Meghan Markle’s new Netflix show

How With Love, Meghan taps into ancient rituals

Jessica Norman

Jessica is a Formation Tutor at St Mellitus College, and completing a PhD in Pauline anthropology,

A woman stands at a kitchen island with a chopping board on it.

Netflix.

It seems Netflix is ‘optimising its content for background viewing’. I rolled my eyes. How depressing. Media companies know we are distracted, and they are altering the content of their shows to accommodate. It is true that “watching TV” no longer means “watching TV.” According to a 2023 YouGov study, 91 per cent of Americans check their phone at least once while watching TV. And now we are learning that TV content is being made so that viewers who have this playing on their screens in the background can actually follow along. Simple story lines, easy dialogue, you name it. I must admit, this is the context that led me to watch Meghan Markle’s new Netflix series, With Love, Meghan. While cooking dinner or tidying the house, I am prone to pop a TV show in the background. This is usually re-watching shows I know well - 24, Desperate Housewives, or Friends – but I thought I would give this new Netflix show a whirl.

I’d seen some of the controversy about this show online and wanted to see what it was like. However, I didn’t want to give my own time to watch it, so it would be the perfect thing to partner with another task, in my case, cooking dinner. As I listened to it in the background, one thing struck me. The language sounded strangely familiar.

I began to overhear terms familiar to me from church. Our time, Meghan told us, was “sacred,” our practices were “rituals,” we give an “offering” to those we love and care about, and we are “blessed” by their presence with us. Had I accidentally clicked on a YouTube sermon from [insert church name here]?

The show kept drawing on language and themes deeply rooted in religion and spiritual traditions—particularly ritual. Frank Gorman once said,

“Ritual … becomes a means by which humans participate in the ongoing order of creation. Their existence is made meaningful as they participate in the never-ending drama of creation in ritual.”

That’s exactly what seemed to be happening in With Love, Meghan. The show wasn’t just about hospitality or relationships but about finding meaning in the everyday through repeated, sacred actions.

The language of sacred time, offerings, and blessings taps into something ancient and profound. In the Bible, God teaches people about His goodness through rituals—structured, embodied practices designed to help them understand who He is and who they are. The Israelites were not just learning ideas; they were instructed in these routine, regular practices that improved and enriched their lives.

Rituals take what is ordinary and transform it into something sacred. They link our memory to the past, present, and future...

Now in our modern world, we’ve largely lost this understanding of the power of ritual. Modern life is often fragmented and distracted—we chase peace but rarely stop long enough to experience it. Yet, in a strange way, shows like Love, Meghan seem to be reclaiming some of that language of ritual, even if unintentionally. Everything we do every day is, in some sense, a ritual. It is sacred. The way we make coffee in the morning, sit down with a friend, and even watch a show while preparing a meal are all embodied practices that shape our inner attitudes toward life. We know that our time is precious, so celebrating and savouring the everyday moments might be key in this deep pursuit of peace. We are returning to rituals.

Rituals take what is ordinary and transform it into something sacred. They link our memory to the past, present, and future, and for Christians, re-orientate us towards God. They make us pause and participate in something bigger than ourselves. Perhaps that’s why the language in With Love, Meghan stood out so much. It wasn’t just talking about hospitality—it was using the language of sacred connection, of a theology rooted in everyday life.

It resonated with me, even as background noise. How can you teach people ritual? You do it through action. Embodied practices—living out meaning with our bodies—have always been central to faith and human connection. Even modern media, designed for distracted consumption, can’t help but borrow from these ancient patterns. If we seek true connection, we have to return to the rituals that shape our everyday lives and, ultimately, remind us that we are a part of something much bigger than ourselves. This is what is truly sacred.

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Review

Belief

Books

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Music

11 December 2024

1 min read

Belle and Sebastian's suffering singer on the struggle and the hope

On the edge of ‘Nobody's Empire’: something good will come.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A singer, wearing a hat, pulls his head back holding a note, and a mic.

Stuart Murdoch performs, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2024.

Andy Witchger, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nobody's Empire: A Novel is the fictionalised account of how Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of indie band Belle and Sebastian, transfigured his experience of Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) through faith and music.

The book has two Belle and Sebastian songs as its keystones. The first, ‘Nobody's Empire’, gives the book its title and is a description of how it feels to have ME:

‘I clung to the bed and I clung to the past

I clung to the welcome darkness

But at the end of the night there's a green green light

It's the quiet before the madness’

Murdoch has been living with ME since the 1980s and is an outspoken advocate for those who have the condition. His experience, as described in ‘Nobody’s Empire’, has been that ‘We are out of practice, we're out of sight / On the edge of nobody's empire’. That is also the experience of Stephen, the central character in Nobody’s Empire, a music loving romantic in Glasgow in the early 1990s who has just emerged from a lengthy hospital stay having been robbed by ME of any prospects of work, a social life or independent living. In Glasgow, he meets fellow ME strugglers who form their own support group and try to get by in life as cheaply and as painlessly as possible.

As the story progresses, he finds he has the ability to write songs and wakes to the possibility of a spiritual life beyond the everyday. Later, he leaves Glasgow with his friend Richard in search of a cure in the mythic warmth of California. Because Murdoch is fictionalising his own experience, Nobody’s Empire offers its readers compelling insights into the experience of ME, particularly the experience of having the condition in the early days when it was little understood. He writes, too, with an engaging ingenuous and childlike curiosity about life and his own experiences.

Nobody’s Empire adds to the conversation about what faith means to rock’s stars.

The second song ‘Ever Had a Little Faith?’ is included towards the end of the novel as one of the early songs written by Stephen. This song, in which the line ‘Something good will come from nothing’ is repeated, is actually an early Belle and Sebastian song that was only recorded for a later album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance. It is a song that was inspired by a sermon preached by Rev John Christie, Minister at Hyndland Parish Church in Glasgow, the church Murdoch attends. He has said of the song: "The sentiment was based on a sermon that our then minister, John Christie, preached about simply getting through a dark night, and the hope of morning."

This Easter morning sense that good will come from the nothingness of being on the edge of nobody’s empire is an experience of transfiguration. Revd Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields has preached perceptively on prayer in terms of incarnation, resurrection, and transfiguration. The prayer of incarnation is a prayer for God to be with us in our difficult circumstances. The prayer of resurrection is a prayer for God to change and fix our difficult circumstances. Then, in response to a possible situation of need, Wells says of a prayer of transfiguration:

“God in your son’s transfiguration we see a whole new reality within, beneath and beyond what we thought we understood. In their times of bewilderment and confusion show my friend and her father that they may find a deeper truth to their life than they ever knew, make firmer friends than they ever had, find reasons for living beyond what they ever imagined and be folded into your grace like never before. Peel back the beauty and strength of their true humanity, transform and transfigure from this chaos and pain something new, something good, something of life.”

This is where Stephen’s story and Murdoch’s experience takes us as there is no fix for ME, as for many other health conditions or disabilities, and Stephen/Murdoch ultimately has no desire to be fixed, as ME becomes an important part of identity for them. Instead, Nobody’s Empire takes us up the mountain through Stephen and Richard’s California experiences, as was the case for Jesus and his disciples at the Transfiguration, so we can see beyond and come to know a deeper reality. As Wells puts it, the prayer of transfiguration is to “Make this trial and tragedy, this problem and pain a glimpse of your glory, a window into your world, where I can see your face, sense the mystery in all things, and walk with angels and saints.”

Faith has featured compellingly in a significant number of relatively recent books by rock stars including, among others, Surrender by U2’s Bono, Walking Back Home by Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross, and Faith, Hope, and Carnage, the record of conversations by Nick Cave and the journalist Sean O'Hagan. Murdoch’s Nobody’s Empire adds to the conversation about what faith means to rock’s stars and how that is expressed through their music but offers an alternative take both as fiction and as a story in which faith and music combine to transfigure life and ME in ways that enable good to come from nothing:

“Do you spend your day?

Second guessing faith

Looking for a way

To live so divine

Drop your sad pretence

You'll be doing fine

You will flourish like a rose in June

You will flourish like a rose in June

Ever had a little faith?

Ever had a little faith?”