Listening to David Milch’s director’s commentary for “John From Cincinnati,” I came upon this:
“You can mythologize any family experience and if it elicits in the hearts of the viewers a sense of the continuity of things, it works as religion.”
Milch is right, I think. Etymologically, “religion” has to do with binding up, with constraining, as in re-ligating. So stories that envision a narrative world in which things work out, where, from a conclusion that ties all the loose ends together, one can see what it all meant for these characters, do work religiously. These are rightly called eschatological stories; for they evoke the at-one-ness, the bound-togetherness of reality.
C.S. Lewis often made use of the “argument from desire,” which says if I have an innate, natural desire for, say, food and water, then objects that can satisfy that desire – in this case food and water – exist. Deeper than all other desires is an infinite desire for “something more.” So, Lewis argues, the infinitude of my desire(s) hints of an Infinite that corresponds to my want. (This is the effective inversion of Freud’s “wish fulfillment” theory.)
So we see, then, that stories that awaken in us a “sense of the continuity of things” exert religious pressure on us do so because we have an innate desire for the continuity of things, i.e., for the eschatological fulfillment of this narrative we call cosmic and human history. We desire an end from which we can see what all this was about, a denouement that will satisfy our desire for meaningfulness. And, if Lewis is right, the fact that we have this desire is our best clue that such an end exists.
Christianity is the (true) mythologizing of a family (Israel) experience, which finds it climax in the Jesus event. That “myth” speaks to our deepest desire, and awakens in us the hope of all hopes: when all is said and done, we can say of God and God’s work what was said over us in the beginning: “It is very good.”
