10hp0265.jpg
If you saw the “Lost” finale, you couldn’t miss the religious overtones — or the setting.

Now CNS is revealing where it was filmed:

The gateway to heaven is through the chapel doors at Sacred Hearts Academy in Honolulu. Or so one could argue after watching the series finale of the ABC-TV show “Lost” in late May. Several key scenes in the last episode were shot at the all-girls Catholic school.

The finale’s penultimate scene showed the major characters from the TV show’s six seasons reuniting after their deaths in a church before “moving on” to another life, as character Christian Shephard called it in the episode, named “The End.”

It is Shephard who opens the main church doors, guarded on each side by an angel statue. Through the doors comes a blazing stream of light that fills the church and engulfs all of the waiting characters.

Several other scenes in the episode showed a coffin arriving at the front of the school grounds, characters talking in a lunch pavilion area outside the chapel, and Shephard and his son, Jack, talking in an office just outside the church.

Despite an attempt to make the scenes seem nondenominational, with Christian and Jack Shephard talking in an office filled with world religious symbols and a multi-faith stained-glass window, many TV critics and fans have interpreted the church to be a sort of purgatory and all of the characters as moving on to heaven, a very Christian ending to “Lost.”

Sacred Hearts Academy has a few “Lost” fans on its faculty and staff, who never missed an episode and were thrilled to see their school featured so prominently in the “Lost” finale.

“When I watched it, I was laughing,” said Toni Normand, director of special programs. “I called my husband in and said, ‘Heaven is right outside of the chapel lanai!'”

Read on for more.

More from Beliefnet and our partners