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It was preposterous.

Push the “execute” button every 108 minutes.  Why?  Because Marvin Candle commands you to do so.  That is, accept on faith the instructions of a man in a white lab coat–a man of science–to perform a nonsensical task on obsolete equipment in an ancient facility built by a long-dead organisation.

The orientation film’s use of scientific imagery to perpetuate the charade was an assault on the very foundations of reason, logic, and science, an absurdity not worth any thinking person’s indulgence, least of all that of expert spinal surgeon Jack Shephard, M.D.

Jack left the Swan Station after viewing the orientation film with Locke and arguing with him over the significance of the film.  But something drove him back to the station.  Was it the fact that John had saved his life a few weeks before?  Or was something else in play?

LOCKE: You have to [push the button].
….
JACK: No. It’s not real. Look, you want to push the button, you do it yourself.
LOCKE: If it’s not real, then what are you doing here, Jack? Why did you come back? Why do you find it so hard to believe?
JACK: Why do you find it so easy?
LOCKE: It’s never been easy! …. It’s a leap of faith, Jack.

Jack Shephard, without a word, reached out his right index finger and depressed the execute button.  He had taken the first step on an arduous, lonely, soul-shaking journey.  In just over three years, Jack Shephard, man of science, would be transformed into Locke’s disciple, the Island’s supreme shaman, committed man of faith.

Disorientation

“Jack is here because he has to do something.  He can’t be told what that is.  He’s got to find it himself.”

Jacob’s words in “Lighthouse” were in full force on the afternoon of September 22, 2004, when Jack experienced the most bewildering set of conditions he had ever been forced to confront.

It took Jack only a few seconds to figure out what might have required several minutes of anyone else.  But Jack had been trained in logical thinking all his life, and his nimble mind quickly strung the facts together into sequences of empirical findings that could lead to only one rational syllogism:  the wreckage on the beach, the people screaming and moaning and limping, those unconscious but still alive, and those who would never again draw breath were all the aftermath of a tragedy in the air.  The plane had crashed.

Jack sprang into action, calling upon every skill he had learned in medical school and in the school of hard knocks going back to the grade-school punch in the face and his father’s contempt for Jack’s abilities.  He brought a pregnant woman to safety, freed a man pinned under wreckage, resuscitated a woman with neither pulse nor breath, saved several people from the concussive effects of explosion, gave instructions to others trying to help, organised the relief effort, and became the de facto leader of the forty-eight who survived.

None of it seemed to matter.  Not the several lives he saved, not his leadership speech six days later, not his ability to triage actions into tasks immediate, tasks for later, and tasks not actionable.  Save those close to death, treat minor wounds as time allows, and say a prayer and wrap a red tag around the toes of people whose injuries are beyond the limits of a septic and deadly environment.  Federal Agent Edward Mars should have received a red tag.  Anyone else would have given him morphine and a prayer.  Or Sawyer’s remedy.  But euthanasia was not in Jack’s medical playbook, and allowing anyone to die was not in Jack’s personal playbook.  He had to save everyone.  He had to fix everyone, even if he caused them pain.  He had to prove his father wrong, and the reproducible exactitudes of science and medicine provided the path toward the spiritual and professional redemption that his father had taken from him.

“You don’t have what it takes, Jack.”  Christian’s words to Jack were a gauntlet thrown to the ground, a summons to determined and sustained action to prove valour and substance.  The island, this ordinary, tropical oasis in the sea, was to be Jack’s operating suite, the place where he would demonstrate forever that he did have what it takes.

It was not until that evening that Jack and those who now looked to him as leader and medical saviour would realise that the crash was the least of their present concerns, and that this island was not ordinary, perhaps not even tropical, and it was definitely not an oasis.   Some being or force or entity was able to fling a one-hundred kilogram man several hundred metres and spew tonnes of dirt and trees into the air in a split second.  Polar bears roamed the Island, seeking human flesh for their next meal.  Mysterious music and scratchy voices came from places–or times–distant.  A recording in French was being broadcast every thirty seconds–for the last sixteen years.

These were phenomena beyond Jack’s abilities, and therefore beyond the scope of science.  Nothing in experience or training or intellect of even the most gifted scientist or accomplished physician could bring coherence to the events and conditions manifest on the Island.  Charlie framed the problem:

“Guys, where are we?”

The Island was unlike any other place on earth.  Science was not only useless here.  It was invalid.  It did not contain the assumptions, tools, or processes required to deal  with any of the Island’s questions.

The crash was the first step, the grand cataclysm that would reach into Jack’s soul, violently loose him from the solid foundations of reason that had grounded him, oriented him, provided him with objective bases for decision and deed.  It was the first punch to the gut.  There would be many more, a flurry of punches over three years, not only painful, but deadly.  The Island was not gentle with Jack.

Foundations

His name is Roger Bacon.  Nowadays he would be addressed as “professor” or “doctor”, but he conducted his experiments and gave his lectures in the early years of the University of Paris and Oxford University, starting in 1237 and ending in 1294.  His title at Oxford was Master, though after his death he was known worldwide as Doctor Mirabilis (“wonderful professor”).

Bacon was the first in a long line of philosophers who adhered to the intellectual rigours of empirical science.  His latter-day disciples include the British philosophers John Locke and David Hume.  Bacon is most often credited with the first full development of what we now understand to be the scientific method.  His decree at Oxford:  Accept nothing on faith.  Believe only what eyes see and ears hear.  For Bacon, the only legitimate route to scientific understanding was the difficult, time-consuming road of empiricism.  Before Bacon, the world’s most authoritative “scientist” was the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle.

Aristotle, if he had witnessed Bacon’s slow, determined, precise placement of mirrors, lenses, and torches in his optics laboratory, would have scoffed at the medieval professor’s slavish devotion to unnecessary experiments.  Observation of natural phenomena (not laboratory creations) and armchair philosophising was all that was required to reveal the secrets of nature, even phenomena as apparently complex as the behaviour of light as it passes through lenses and bounces off mirrors.  Raw syllogism and understanding of Causes was sufficient to any scientific endeavour.  Bacon would have listened (he understood the Greek language, after all), but patience wearing thin, he’d probably have responded in Latin or French, chuckling to himself over the ancient philosopher’s inability to understand.

Among the several areas in which Bacon faulted Aristotle for lack of rigour was the notion of Final Cause.  The Final Cause was an entity’s purpose.   The Final Cause of a pencil is writing.  One need not have any experience to assign a Final Cause.  The question of a pencil’s purpose, a pencil’s destiny, was not a question Bacon could address in the laboratory.  He could load a sharpened pencil into a crossbow and with it pierce a man’s chest.  Did this mean the pencil’s “Final Cause” was instrument of death?  The question of purpose or destiny is not a question admissible to empirical science, and to pose it in the laboratory is to misunderstand the entire methodology and intent (purpose!) of experimental science.

Science Without Purpose

I provide below a précis drawn from earlier essays regarding science as it relates to LOST.  For those who wish to view the original passages in their entirety, please consult the appropriate headings at these addresses:

http://www.sl-lost.com/2010/06/01/humanitas-insulae-the-culture-of-lost-by-pearson-moore/
http://www.sl-lost.com/2010/02/14/impartial-risk-cultural-musings-on-the-resurrection-of-john-locke/

Science is confined by logic.   If I expand the limits of research to any inquiry that might be included within the scope of logic, science, and mathematics, I must necessarily accept that certain limits nevertheless exist.  Most importantly, I may not ever claim to investigate or to have discovered any facet of reality.  The best I might hope to accomplish, even after a lifetime in the laboratory, is to establish the adherence of certain observed phenomena to models of reality that I create through inference, induction, and deduction.  These models are most often referred to as theories, but they can never explain the real world.  We rely on assumptions that negate any possible connection with reality.

One of the most important assumptions underlying science is Ockham’s Razor (http://www.galilean-library.org/manuscript.php?postid=43832).  In plain language, Ockham’s Razor insists the scientist must accept the simplest solution to a problem as being the correct solution.  If I can imagine a chemical reaction as being the result of the collision of five molecule, but I can equally imagine that the reaction is the result of the collision of just two molecules, and if every observation I have made supports either of the fruits of my imagination, I must accept as valid and correct the imagined event that includes just two molecules.  The reality may be that only one molecule is required, or seven molecules are required, or the event occurs only when there are sunspots on our solar system’s star, but I can never know this.  Even if the model I develop happens to support a theory that is close to reality, I may not ever claim to have elucidated even the slightest aspect of reality.  I am allowed to conclude only that certain behaviours seem reproducible and that they also seem to adhere to a model consistent with Ockham’s Razor and the other underlying  assumptions of the scientific method.

Science and logic are imperfect subsets of reality.  If we rely on logic as revelation of reality we will discern only an incomplete, warped world far from true reality.

Science makes sensory observations, catalogues these data, uses the rules of mathematics and logic to create connections among the observations, and builds empirical findings into models of reality that we call hypotheses and theories.  A scientist truly comfortable in her laboratory will never claim she is revealing reality, only a poor model for certain physical behaviours that seem to follow a reproducible pattern.  There is no truth in science.  Science is not a tool for illuminating the fulness of reality.

I pick up a pen with the five fingers of my right hand.  Science notes this fact, records the observations associated with the act.  And that is all science can do.  Science cannot tell us my motivation for picking up the pen, cannot predict what I will do with it, how I will do it, what the future outcomes will be, or how the ramifications of the simple act will ripple through the greater world, how the act will affect others.

Science cannot place even the simplest act within the continuum of reality.  Complex interactions are so far outside the realm of pure science that they virtually defy adequate description.  In fact, no interaction can be fully characterised.  Science and logic must be forever partial, incomplete statements of certain events, and they can never claim to explain a basis in reality.

Scroll up to the photograph of Roger Bacon and take a few moments to scrutinise the image.  Look at the clothing he is wearing and his haircut.

Life With Purpose

Imagine now you are approaching Master Bacon on a cold winter day on the busy Oxford campus.  You see his brown robe–the Franciscan habit–and his strange haircut, called a tonsure.  The good friar is on his way from the lecture hall to mass at the basilica, where he is to be the celebrant.  He carries two books in his arms:  his Opus majus V (collected works in optics), and the Bible.

Perhaps you are Aristotelian in your outlook, but whatever your philosophy of life, you carry an ornate and very sharp pugio (Roman dagger) and when you draw close you raise it to his neck, ready to end his life.

“Renounce your belief in optics,” you say, “or prepare to die.”

Bacon laughs, hands over the book he laboured over for many years, and says, “Fine.  I renounce my belief in optics.”

Probably you are emboldened by this unexpected and easy success, for the next words out of your mouth are these:  “Renounce your belief in your Deity, or prepare to die.”

The response is immediate and unexpected.

“I cannot but renounce the way in which I practice my faith, for I am a weak and unworthy servant of my Master.  But the One I worship as Creator I embrace as Redeemer, never to be renounced, always to be served and adored.  I hope your dagger is sharp, for your path to this Bible lies over my dead body.”

Roger Bacon was a practitioner of pure empirical science.  He was also a priest, a friar in the Franciscan tradition.  There was for him no conflict between faith and science.  But if push came to shove, Bacon would sacrifice science in an instant.  He would never sacrifice his faith.

Becoming Roger Bacon

One man became a persistent thorn in Jack’s side.  Like his father, this man was essentially telling Jack that he was not up to the tasks before him.  Everything he had based his life on, according to this man, was fundamentally flawed, insufficient to the daily struggles of life in this hostile place, invalid to the enormous problems of the Island.

LOCKE:  You and I don’t see eye-to-eye sometimes, Jack… you’re a man of science.
JACK: Yeah, and what does that make you?
LOCKE: Me, well, I’m a man of faith. Do you really think all this is an accident — that we, a group of strangers survived, many of us with just superficial injuries? Do you think we crashed on this place by coincidence — especially, this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason.
JACK: Brought here? And who brought us here, John?
LOCKE: The Island. The Island brought us here. This is no ordinary place, you’ve seen that, I know you have. But the Island chose you, too, Jack. It’s destiny.

This video, narrated in John Locke’s own voice, is arguably the best fan-produced Lost trailer (though my favourite remains this one, also produced by SL-Lost:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swHST-s0s3E), and one of the reasons I decided to submit essays at SL-Lost.  The video I think captures something of the essence of LOST; I find it difficult to view it now without becoming a bit misty-eyed.

Locke was primary proponent of the nonsense Jack had heard on the Swan Station orientation film.  By the time Locke and Jack viewed the film they were firm adversaries.  I am not certain about Jack’s rationale for resolving the conflict depicted in the image above.  As I speculated in the introduction to this essay, he may have pushed the “execute” key out of some feeling that he “owed” Locke something for saving his life.  Or perhaps he realised pushing the button was the quickest way to end a pointless argument that had already consumed precious time of far too many people.

Most likely, Jack had no rationale.  No syllogism led to the conclusion that he had to press the button.  Rather, I believe he had the first glimmers of a “Final Cause”.  He could not yet discern a purpose for pushing the button, but he was willing to admit of the possibility of a destiny not distilled from logic.  He had already tasted failure, in the death of Boone on his makeshift operating table.  That same night he found his advanced training of no use, and minimum medical knowledge not indispensible to the survival of his flock; Kate, with no medical training, delivered a very healthy Aaron Littleton into the world.  I think that first bit of doubt regarding the universal applicability of science was what allowed him to follow another man’s instinct.  Locke referred to any decision to push the button as “a leap of faith”.  Compared to the enormous leaps that would be required of Jack in the next thirty-eight months, depressing the execute key was a small step.  But it was the first movement, a significant step, toward a life of purpose.

Jack’s Reality

Jack enjoyed a reciprocal love relationship with Sarah for the first few years after he operated on her spine and restored her ability to walk.  His higher calling at the time of the crash was Science.  He enjoyed several reciprocal trusting relationships, the most visible example being the one with Hugo Reyes, though he trusted several others, among them Kate Austen, Sayid Jarrah, and later, Bernard Nadler.  Hurley was always special.  Even from the earliest days of the crash, Jack entrusted Hugo with essential tasks:  the survivor census, the distribution of food from the Swan Station stores, the holding of survivor medical information.  Hurley was Jack’s first lieutenant on the Island and closest friend off the Island.

Jack presented a solid exterior persona, but he was near the end of his rope emotionally and intellectually.  His closest friend, his wife, left him for another man.  He had never really been attached to Sarah the woman, never allowed his spirit to touch hers.  She had been a project for him, something to “fix”, not a person to respect and adore and love.  Science was the purpose to which he had dedicated his life, but the routines of syllogistic logic could do nothing to alleviate the fact that his father died in an alcoholic stupor and his body had somehow migrated out of its coffin to places unknown.

Jack had no soul mate, only very peripheral trust relationships with a handful of people, he was beginning to question his life’s calling, and he was the victim of two individuals who seemed to torment him at every turn.  Christian believed Jack continually fell short of what he ought to be.  Locke told Jack that everything he believed in, the purpose to which Jack had dedicated his life, was insufficient.

Jack’s reality is our reality.  Who among us has committed heart, mind, and soul to a purpose greater than self?  Who among us has a true soul mate?  Jack’s lack of clear antagonist, and the pain associated with that ambiguity, was our pain, too.  Who was the true antagonist in LOST?  John Locke?  Christian Shephard?  Benjamin Linus?  Charles Widmore?  Martin Keamy?  Stuart Radzinsky?  A great deal of thought over several years would be required to discern the identity of the true antagonist.

Jack’s Needs

Sarah Shephard was a beautiful woman.  She was kind, gracious, self-sacrificing–in every way beautiful.  I would imagine just about anyone looking at the photograph above would say Sarah is a pretty woman.  Everyone, that is, except Dr. Jack Shephard.  Jack, before 2007, would look at this photograph and note only that Sarah had a perfectly formed spine, that he had “fixed” her.  Such were the depths of his psychosis, his self-absorption.

Jack near the end of 2004 was experiencing the beginnings of a life-altering sequence of events.  His conversion was accelerated by an emotionally degraded condition, but the extraordinary transformation he was to undergo would nearly destroy him.  He would need something–some constant–to ensure his survival through the worst of the storms to batter his soul.

He found that Constant in a woman of extraordinary beauty.  Kate Austen never told anyone that she attached the oxygen mask to Agent Ed Mars, that she ensured the survival of the man who had relentlessly hunted her across the United States.  She never told anyone of her deep love for her mother, for Tom Brennan, for Claire and Aaron.  Her love of others showed in her attitudes, in her actions, in her lovely smile.  A fugitive, a murderer, Kate paradoxically had deep inside her an abiding respect and love for her fellow human beings.  The great surgeon Dr. Jack Shephard, accomplished and admired, paragon of virtue, exemplar to all, never felt that deep love in his life before the Island.  Kate possessed a beauty entirely foreign to Jack’s understanding, but he needed empathy for others, had to understand and act on others’ needs if he was to become the person he was destined to be.  More than anyone he had ever known, Jack needed Kate Austen.

Jack’s Descent

The crash of Oceanic Flight 815.
The Smoke Monster.
Charlie’s hanging and almost-death.
Boone’s death.
Shannon’s death.
Capture and imprisonment by the Others.
Desmond’s prediction of Charlie’s death.
Charlie’s death.
Keamy’s band of Blackwater thugs.
Locke, right about everything:
The freighter coming to kill them, not rescue them.
Having faith strong enough to move mountains–and the Island on which the mountains stood.
Their purpose on the Island.
The resurrection of Christian Shephard.
And on top of it all, Locke’s death–by suicide.

Less than two years after their rescue from the Island, Jack was at the end of his endurance.  Everything he believed was proven wrong.  Everything his greatest nemesis said was true, and then some.  Locke had accessed some reservoir of truth that went far beyond the facts Jack had once believed were incontrovertible truth.  The truths Locke put into words had nothing to do with science, were unconstrained by even the most generous allowances of logic.  Locke had discovered absolutes not subject to the shifting sands of hypothesis or theory.  They were true in the past, true now, would remain always true regardless of future events.

Little remained to anchor Jack in this world.  His apartment full of maps and protractors and global coordinates and calculations and flight schedules, he was obsessed by a single idea:  returning to the Island.  It was the only place his life had any meaning, but there was no way to return.  He stood on top of the bridge, looking to the bare concrete far below, ready to end his life.  He was startled out of his plan by the sound of a crash behind him.  He temporarily reverted to his former self, saving a woman and her child from the flames.  But his final salvation was delivered by a most unlikely agent.  “We have to return to the Island,” Ben Linus told him, and Ben knew exactly the way it could be accomplished.  Jack Shephard was ready.

Jack’s Post-Enlightenment Reality

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

Jack was no Übermensch, for belief in such a monstrosity would require a relinquishing of faith.  Jack’s transformation was a knock-out blow to the warped Nietzschean ideal of radical individualism and the denial of absolute truth.  Jack’s journey almost killed him, and did make him stronger, but his was a strength based on service to Locke’s eternal truths, not a Nazi-like worship of self.

Jack became a man of faith due to the good example of John Locke.  The transformation was not instantaneous, but occurred over several months.  In the critical weeks leading to Jack’s final purpose, he had still not formulated an understanding of his destiny.  At the end of Season Five, only days after he had stopped feeding his body opiates and vodka, he remained largely incoherent.  Sawyer beat a confession out of him:  Jack wanted to detonate the hydrogen bomb so he could have a second chance with Kate.  His mind was still foggy from the drugs, I think.

Had he forgotten Kate’s words on Penny’s ship?  “I have always been with you,” Kate told him.  Kate was Jack’s Constant.  He didn’t need to do anything, least of all risk the lives of dozens of people and the welfare of the Island, to secure his place in her heart.

Such were Jack’s actions as he came out of his psychosis and began to understand his destiny.  Attempting to detonate the bomb accomplished nothing that had not already been established.  Everyone knew of “The Incident”; it was not until Juliet died and everyone else was transported thirty years into the future that we understood who was responsible for the catastrophic event.  Perhaps history would record that Stuart Radzinsky alone was guilty of an over-exuberance that led to the uncontrolled discharge of raw electromagnetic power.  But Jack’s folly certainly contributed to the severity and enduring effects of the catastrophe.

Jack was stronger, not only through enlightenment, but through those who came before him, through the one who risked all and died to bring him back to the Island.  The one whose body was not resurrected, and lies on Boone Hill, on the Island that was his Constant.

Compare Jack’s pitiful, bottom-of-the-barrel existence in 2004 with the emotional and spiritual wealth and richness of his life in 2007.  In 2004, Jack believed John Locke and his own father to be enemies.  In 2007, Jack considered Locke his spiritual master.  And though he did not yet know it, Christian Shephard did more than bring Jack the physical refreshment of liquid water (in “White Rabbit”).  Christian also shepherded his son to the spiritual renewal that only the living water of the Island could provide.   In the space of three years, Locke and Christian went from apparent enemies to the spiritual leaders of a vast cohort:  Kate, Hurley, Sawyer, Ben, Richard, Miles, Frank, and the great martyrs, Charlie and Sayid.  They were all conspiring to pull Jack to greatness, to fulfill his destiny, which was the destruction of evil and the salvation of the Island.

Love and Faith

There are many types of love, and many ways to express and understand faith.  Romeo and Juliet, above, express erotic love.  Kate’s love of Claire and Aaron was not erotic, but agape, or altruistic love.

Many fans of LOST consider Kate’s decision to leave the Island, and Jack’s decision to stay, to be unrealistic, and not in keeping with their spiritual connection.  Wouldn’t Kate have stayed with Jack to the bitter end?  Perhaps she could have pulled him to the Temple, to heal his wounds.

No.  The depiction of the their parting was entirely realistic.  But don’t trust me on this point.  Trust your grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and anyone who lived through or fought in the War.

“Casablanca” told the story of a woman and a man who truly loved each other.  They went their separate ways, just as Jack and Kate did, and for essentially the same reasons.  Ilsa Lund’s feelings for Rick Blaine were stronger than her attachment to the freedom fighter, Victor Laszlo.  But Laszlo was Europe’s hope against Nazi plans to enslave the world.

Ilsa: But what about us?
Rick: We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.
Rick: And you never will. But… Where I’m going, you can’t follow. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

With those words, Rick forced Ilsa on the plane, to maintain her position as wife and help mate to Laszlo.  Neither of them wanted to leave the other, but the salvation of Europe, the salvation of the world, literally rested on their decision.  Depriving themselves, they made the only possible decision, the only human decision.  A decision based in faith.

“Casablanca” was intended to be just another crank-’em-out propaganda piece, something to stir up the boys on the front and keep the fires burning back home.  It became much more than that; to this day, “Casablanca” is regarded by many as the finest film of the twentieth century.  The acting was first rate, but the production values, even by 1942 standards, were poor.

There can be only one solid reason for Casablanca’s appeal over the decades:  It describes something of the true nobility of the human spirit.

Your grandmothers and great-grandmothers know the film, feel its authenticity, because they know of real-life Rick Blaines and Ilsa Lunds.  Countless thousands of men gave up family and girlfriend or wife to fight in the war.  Many who might have been rejected for service falsified medical records so they could fight.  The United States was a latecomer to World War II, but thousands of men in that country smuggled themselves across the Canadian border before the U.S. declared war and fought in the Canadian or British armies.  John Paul Merton, U.S. citizen and brother of famed spiritual writer Thomas Merton, died while flying for the RAF.  John Gillespie Magee, Jr., author of “High Flight” (the poem that for many years was the “sign-off”, in the days when television stations “went off the air” (stopped broadcasting), usually somewhere between midnight and two a.m.:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQYd_INSOg), was an American eager to fight.  He slipped into Canada and died, in flight, wearing a Royal Canadian Air Force uniform.

John Paul Merton and John Gillespie Magee, Jr., and the countless thousands of others, did not leave behind friends and family, wives and girlfriends to fight for England or for Canada.  They did it to fight for us, for all of us in this world.  Their love for family and spouse was not weak.  It was strong.  They were willing to die for that love.  “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”  The sacrifice they made is not “proof” of anything, but is the surest testament to the abiding goodness of the human spirit.

Island Faith

The LOST character most closely associated with an organised religion was the Roman Catholic, Mr. Eko.  It can be argued, and I think correctly, that the character most truly observant of the meaningful tenets of an organised religion was the Muslim, Sayid Jarrah.  We saw Ben praying in a Christian church.  Charlie crossed himself before he died (though with his left hand; perhaps a brand of Anglicanism that is not much publicised outside of the U.K.?).  Kate was married in a Christian church, though she profaned the proceedings by marrying under false name and false pretense.

But adherence to organised religion is not what LOST means by the word “faith”.  Neither is faith on Mittelos a question of simply believing in something.  One might be the most devout Muslim, the most observant Jew, the most committed disciple of Jesus, and fall far short of LOST’s definition of faith.

Faith for LOST is not only an acceptance of the validity and truth of things unseen and unprovable, it is the surrender of self to the service of humanity.  Kate gave up self, gave up a future with Jack, to serve Claire and Aaron.  Jack gave up his self, his very life, to serve the Island, and through it, all of humanity.  Faith on the Island of Mittelos is the kind of faith Rick and Ilsa expressed, the sort of faith for which John Paul Merton and John Gillespie Magee, Jr. gave their lives.  It is the type of love that requires no tit-for-tat reciprocity.  John Locke, at the time wheel, did not ask what was in it for him when Christian Shephard, the Island’s representative, told Locke he would have to die, that he was to become the “sacrifice the Island demands”.  He accepted his fate, because he was the Island’s truest and most humble servant.  He believed in (we without his brand of faith might say he “loved”) the Island.

The Final Journey

Much will be written about Jack Shephard in years to come.  He was one of the most lovingly-created heroes in fiction, and the entire story of LOST will transcend time and culture.  This is not “Soylent Green”, a film that really should not be watched without having first consumed at least a quart of hearty ale, and definitely not viewed by anyone who did not live through the seventies.  LOST is more akin to Star Trek in its universal and enduring appeal, in its courageous exploration of core human values.

Jack brought people together.  They worked together, lived together.  “If we can’t live together, we will die alone.”  Jack’s work save people, saved the Island society, saved the Island itself.  Before Jack first woke on the Island, the shepherd who watched over Mittelos called the dog, Vincent.  “Come here,” Christian said.  “Good boy…. I need you to go find my son. He’s over there in that bamboo forest, unconscious. I need you to go wake him up…. He has work to do.”  Three years later (or thirty years later), Jack’s work completed, the Island again summoned Vincent.  The Island’s saviour, the most deserving of the Island’s servants, could not possibly be the one who would die alone.  So Vincent, humble servant that he was, accompanied Jack on the last moments of his journey through life.  It was an ending fitting to the man, fitting to his faith in things known but unseen, of things unprovable but undeniable.  Jack Shephard, man of faith, died in the place for which he had given his life.  It was the final apologia pro vita fidei, the best way to complete a story grounded in the highest ideals of our shared humanity.

PM

Related posts:

1. White Rabbit: The Cultural and Symbolic Significance of Christian Shephard in LOST by Pearson Moore
2. So You Could Find One Another: Cultural Perfections in LOST 6.17-6.18 “The End” by Pearson Moore
3. Isla Cognita: Cultural Knowledge in LOST 6.13 “The Last Recruit” by Pearson Moore

Tags: Jack, Pearson Moore, recaps&reviews