My Monday Night Bible Study group finished its study using the film EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED. My Bible studies are really like movie-Bible clubs, where we use television and films, and try to find ways in which the things we watch might illuminate various parts of the Bible. The film EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED is absolutely dynamite. It is about a young Jewish man who goes over to the Ukraine to find his roots, guided by a funny but deranged family. It is hilarious, it is sad, it is moving, and it is particularly meaningful.
Without giving too much of the plot away, the central theme is all about the way the past exists alongside us in the present. The film commends to its viewers a definite belief in transcendence, in some kind of Source of meaning and value. In the film, the past itself...memory, consequence, and things created in former times... is in some sense transcendent, a source of meaning and value. One may almost say that the film suggests that the past itself is God.
One cannot deny that there is an insight here. It is not incidental that one of the most common features of some of the most ancient religions is ancestor worship and veneration. We are naturally attracted to old and ancient things. Who among us has not seen an old picture of a grandparent, some ancient ruin, or learned some historical fact, and not felt a sense of something numinous...as if the very encounter with the past is an encounter with Something Great.
Religions are most effective when they have an ancient history. The attraction to the ancient and the old is not incidental...it feeds right into one of the 'mundane religious experiences' I have so often spoken and written about (alongside humor, play, hope, meaning, our experience of good and evil, innocence, etc.) The experience of the ancient itself is the experience of something transcendent. The past is not just a passing something. It lives alongside us. I've seen no more beautiful, intricate, and moving examination of this fact than the film EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED.
We need links to our past. Belief as a component of cultural identification is something that is often derided nowadays, at least among Christians and secularists. 'You shouldn't believe just because that is what your parents did'... this is what we are told and there is some truth in that. But it is only a partial truth. For faith, commitment, these things do accompany a cultural context, and one's own cultural experience is going to be limited without them. If human life fully lived is lived within such a context, then might not faith as a part of a fully lived cultural experience be justified?
Robert Wright and Robert Pollack once had an exchange about this that stuck with me:
"Robert Pollack: No but no but that this is what makes religion so
difficult to talk about as a scientist. These things are valuable
conversations but they will not stop me from praying tomorrow and when I
pray I will not I will not have proof that I'm I'm not wasting my time
but I will bet that way and in so doing if Dawkins says I'm following
another kind of (()) trap so be it. I don't feel that way. I accept the
threat that the failure to feel that way is the victory of that mean but
I'll bet this way and I'll bet this way partly because I want to and
partly because as a mortal being I have a certain irreducible regard and
respect for my ancestors and for other people's ancestors who have held
to these irrational beliefs. I feel some obligation not to drop that
ball.
Wright: So it's it's to some extent an act of cultural fidelity.
Robert Pollack: Correct.
Wright: Ok.
Robert Pollack: I think I think it has to be Robert because because a
religion of one is not a religion. I think all religions grow as
social... they are if they emerge nomadically the emerge from societies
they don't they are stimulated by individual revelation but religious
structures that last through time are cultural artifacts that last by
shared teaching parent-teacher by vertical transmission as well as
horizontal transmission and and so I'm the recipient of all of those.
Look I guess another way to put it is as we are all in our genomes the
carriers of thousands of dead sequences that get into the germ line and
therefore must be replicated in our species so also probably culturally
where the transmitters are thousands of dead ideas that we're stuck with
and it's my bet that this ideas not dead. That's the only difference I
have with Dawkins."
I think that, in the end, my own approach to God helps make sense of this sense of connection with the past, with the past itself having some transcendent meaning and/or value. For to me God is, in part, the repository of all past experience. If God 'remembers' everything we are, and that which is of value in the world, both from an objective and subjective perspective, is retained in the mind or life of God, then through our relationship with God, we have a relationship with that past. That which illuminates life, really is that which came before, for God's eternally growing self is the eternal retention of all that happens that is right and good in the world. It is God's role as immortalizer, that makes all of this make sense.
For truly, the most important part of anyone's life is their own internal subjective experience. It is the moment of being me, doing this thing, feeling this way, that really has value. I care less about my own memory of someone than that they remember me. And our seeking to connect with the past through story and art is really an attempt to grab onto, however dimly, that subjective experience which seems to, from our own earthly perspective, fall into nothingness.
If God remembers all I was and am, then my own subjectivity does not actually pass that way. It passes into eternity, and eternity is not some inert memory bank, but a living God, who stands with us, walks along side us, and through that experience we share, here and now, with all that came before. Our own memory is thus a sacrament, pointing to something deeper and more cosmic. As someone who thinks all phenomenal conscious experience is such a sacrament, that makes a lot of sense to me.
I end with a Christological reflection. For Jesus to me reveals and makes clear this Divine reality. Jesus shows us a God upon whom all of reality is 'impressed'. Every good, every bad, does not fade away, but finds expression in the very self of God. If the moment is divinized, then illumination of what is, always comes from what once was.