LOST: Pulling Back The Curtain

We’re off to see the Wizard…er, I mean Jacob…as LOST moves towards the end of its penultimate season [There are SPOILERS ahead if you have not yet seen the most recent episode to air in the US] Last night’s episode “Follow the Leader” saw John Locke leading “his people”, the Others, to go see Jacob, and to the surprise of everyone watching, the episode ended with Locke telling Ben he intends to kill Jacob.

We should not forget the earlier allusion to the Wizard of Oz in the episode “The Man Behind The Curtain” – the last, indeed the only, episode in which we caught a glimpse of Jacob.

There seems to be a sense in which LOST is taking us back into the realm of some classic science fiction treatment of religion and the supernatural. I was struck, when re-watching some of the earliest episodes of Star Trek a couple of months ago, that from the outset the show accepted that there were things that classically were thought of as supernatural – ESP, and indeed individuals that become god-like – but assumed there would be some sort of scientific explanation. To allude to a later episode, Apollo and the other Greek gods could have existed – they would just be aliens, with organs to conduct electricity allowing them amazing powers. As the series and its spin-offs progressed, this theme continued: the universe was full of strange and mysterious powers and much that would likely remain unexplained. If there is a point of disconnect between the humanism of someone like Gene Roddenberry and that of someone like James Randi, it seems that the former sought to scientify mythology, while the latter seeks simply to debunk it. And while Randi clearly has done marvellous work in exposing frauds, and persuaded many that psychic powers and the like are not real, there seems to be a deep longing in the human soul for magic, for enchantment. We find it hard to live in a universe that has no hope of being populated by wizards and/or deities.

And so, as John Locke leads his people on a pilgrimage to pull back the curtain, one wonders whether we’re witnessing a moment akin to the “Death of God” theology that had its peak around the same time as classic Star Trek. What will we see when the curtain is pulled back? A mere human being, who has been manipulating time – and people – to his own ends? Nothing at all?

The curtain plays an important role in Biblical religion, too. A curtain separates off the holy of holies, where God was thought to dwell, enthroned on the ark of the covenant. If one went in there, or touched the ark, one would surely die. But of course, conquering superpowers did enter and plunder, and unless time-travellers from the island warned them to ship it off to Ethiopia, presumably it was the Babylonians who took the ark, and Israel’s theologians had to wrestle with that and make sense of it – as for instance Ezekiel, who places the “true” ark in heaven, with wheels within wheels so that it can follow God’s people anywhere.

The curtain has an important symbolic role in the New Testament too, as the outer curtain is torn symbolizing judgment on the temple, and as the author to the Hebrews speaks of Jesus bringing us through the veil into God’s presence.

But what will we see behind the veil? The assumption is always that we’ll see something that will either awe us or literally blow us away. But there is a fear that many have, that if the curtain is drawn back, we’ll find the sanctum sanctorum empty, or find there a man with levers looking rather embarrassed.

It has been a struggle of many religious traditions over the past few centuries (and more) to deal with the apparent disconnect between our desire for deities we can relate to personally, and our desire that the deity with whom we have to do be the ultimate reality. Yet there is a tension there, and it isn’t clear that either classic attempts to deal with it – whether classic Christian theism, Gnosticism, or Hinduism, or more modern permutations such as deism or panentheism – have satisfactorily addressed the underlying issue. Theologians for the most part explore the ultimate, but we continue to long for a deity who is basically like us, only stronger, one who can be our friend, and come to our rescue.

When we’ve met such figures in Star Trek, or the Wizard of Oz, they have been a disappointment. And indeed, Gnosticism arose largely as a result of disappointment with the figure of the Creator as depicted in Scripture.

Without mystery and metaphor, our lives are impoverished. But we shouldn’t miss an opportunity to pull back the curtain and look behind it. Because sometimes we find comfort in not knowing what we could know if we put the time and effort into it. Sometimes we’d prefer to live believing in a certain sort of concept of God, because rethinking and revising our most deeply-held beliefs is painful.

What will we find when John Locke “pulls back the curtain”, assuming he is able to do so? I don’t honestly know. But the Christian Scriptures depict Jesus leading his people through the curtain, into a place that traditionally struck terror into the hearts of those excluded from it.

We should not hesitate to pull back the curtain. If we die, it will have been an opportunity for divine power to be manifested in our time, as in the stories of old. And if there is no lightning bolt, perhaps even nothing visible behind the curtain, or simply a person, then we discover that which many of us find even more terrifying than the numinous mystery of the holy of holies: discovering that our thinking was wrong, and the daunting prospect of rethinking, revising, and rebuilding. In other words, learning. But religion and magic (in the modern sense) have this in common: when the curtain is pulled back, when we are offered explanations as to how what seemed impossible was taking place, we tend to feel like, in gaining knowledge, we’ve also lost something in the process, the wonder and mystery. And so the challenge is whether we can grow in our understanding of what is going on, without losing the “magic” in the process. Or do we have to choose one or the other?