My husband and I consciously choose to watch only one television show at a time, which we watch, well, religiously. For the past few years, our show has been Lost. Its dramatic plot and love stories and perpetual mysteries all piqued my interest, but the show, written by a Catholic and a Jew, also played with philosophical and theological themes that kept me coming back for more. Sunday night’s series finale was no exception.
Judeo-Christian language and imagery show up repeatedly. There’s Jacob, who, to pass the mantel of leadership of the island to Jack Shepherd, dips a cup into water and says, “Drink this.” The scene is laden with references to the Last Supper. There’s Jack’s father, Christian Shepherd, who dies and comes to life again, as one of a handful of resurrected characters. Light is the source of all goodness. Miraculous healings abound.
But, as much as the show draws on Christian symbols, it doesn’t offer a Christ figure. There is no personal deity. Although “the island,” through Jacob, summons wayward individuals to itself, those individuals are then on their own, left to call forth their individual light and let it shine as they see fit. Lost could easily be dismissed as yet another syncretistic attempt to speak in vaguely positive spiritual terms, failing to say anything specific about God.
One aspect of Sunday’s show stands out, however, for its theological truth. Over the course of the past season, two story lines have been playing out in tandem. In one, the characters never crashed on the island. Their flight from Australia lands in Los Angeles without a hitch,and they go on with their normal lives, with varying degrees of happiness. In the other, life on the island continues, as the same characters battle against nature, against each other, and against the evil smoke monster. The final episode brings the two stories together.
In order for the two stories to merge, the people in LA need to remember their lives on the island. But simply seeing one another isn’t enough. The memory of their time together on the island comes through physical touch, and it comes only through love. When Jin and Sun see their baby in an ultrasound exam, when Kate helps Claire give birth to Aaron, when Charlie brings Claire a blanket, when Juliet hands Sawyer a candy bar—profound or mundane, the physical touch from the hand of the beloved prompts memory and reunion.
In every case, the memory of love becomes a present reality. The pain of the past is overcome. The dead are alive. The wounded are healed. Those separated are reunited. As Tolkien might say, “Everything bad has come untrue.”
It is here that the creators of Lost got it right, in recognizing the power of love and the power of physical touch to enable memory, healing, and joy. In the Bible, Jesus explains that we need “eyes to see” the deeper, spiritual reality, the kingdom of God at work around us. Lost‘s characters did not have eyes to see one another, and they did not have eyes to see themselves, until they encountered love. For Christians, it is Jesus who gives us eyes to see: eyes to see the world as it is and to know ourselves loved within it. Jesus did not demonstrate God’s healing power from a far-off place. Rather, he healed and cared for people by touching them. He put his hands on the eyes of the blind man. He touched the lepers. And his touch was the touch of one who loves. His loving touch enables us to see.
Each of Lost‘s characters was alone when the series began. Even the married couple, Jin and Sun, felt alienated from one another. Over the course of the series, these rugged individuals soon realized that they needed one another, that they needed community in order to survive. Moreover, they needed one another in order to understand themselves, and in order to become whole.
Christian theology is relational at its core. The Father loves the Son loves the Spirit, and from that Trinitarian love emerges creation. That love for human beings extends so far that God came as one of us. In his book Love Walked Among Us, Paul Miller points out a pattern that emerges in the Gospels. Jesus sees a person in need, feels compassion towards that person, and moves toward that person to offer help (cf. Luke 7:11-17). The same pattern holds true of God in the Old Testament (Ex. 3:7).
Lost certainly is not suggesting that the Trinitarian God is the answer to the world’s problems. The final scene—with a stained-glass window incorporating a pantheon of religious symbols, including everything from a cross to a yin-yang circle—is as vague and vacuous as modern spirituality gets. This is a show that, for the most part, gets its theology wrong. But it is also a show that, for the most part, gets its relationships right. As a result, the series depicts theological truth even as it shies away from proclaiming it.
CT’s Entertainment Blog has covered Lost several times, including regular installments from Chris Seay, author of The Gospel According to Lost. Seay said he was disappointed with the series finale. Online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey spoke with Entertainment Weekly’s Lost aficionado, Jeff ‘Doc’ Jensen, last week. Her.meneutics blogger Laura Leonard has written about Lost’s female characters.
