His likeness has been pecked into the sides of cliff faces from coast to coast, and adherents must place pebbles at his shrines in order to appear holy or in possession of “Oneness.” Jonathan’s image has been warped and morphed into something unrecognizable, used in pursuit of obscure and esoteric rituals that serve only to make gulls feel superficially pious without forcing them to actually work to expand their mind, test their bodies, or improve their spirits. Jonathan has become an icon, depicted in rich plumage, wearing crowns of shells and other baubles. In the two hundred years since his departure from earth in a glimmering haze, “nearly every element of Jonathan’s teaching taken out of daily practice by the simple pronouncement that it was Holy, and beyond the aspiration of common gulls.” The central ethos of Jonathan’s message to his fellow gulls-the use of flight as a way to unify mind, body, and spirit around the goal of self-determination-has been replaced by obsessive rites and rituals that exclude many would-be disciples of Jonathan’s message. As the reader works their way through the final pages of the story, an obvious parable emerges: Richard Bach has composed a tale that mirrors the perceived failures of religions and belief systems the world over, and which indicts religious and spiritual movements for their creation of cults of personality and the self-centered search for validation through “holiness.” In pointing out the ways in which religious doctrines are often misinterpreted and misused, Bach suggests that religious and spiritual movements must-or at least should-reexamine their roots and return to the simplistic messages of self-discovery, charity and community, pursuit of a greater collective good, and the sacredness not of one figurehead but of each member of the larger community. In the centuries that have passed, Jonathan’s teachings of introspection, self-determination, and the pursuit of one’s individual truth have been misinterpreted, warped, and picked apart like so much chum. The fourth and final section of Jonathan Livingston Seagull flashes forward nearly two hundred years after Jonathan’s disappearance from the face of the earth and supposed ascendance to heaven.
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