Page - 183 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

arating vision. “Whenever a mind … receives a divine wisdom”, Emerson wrote at this point in his life, “old things pass away, – means, teachers, texts, tem- ples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.”29 Yet such experiences of revelation need not always lead one away from established forms of religious authority. They also can just as easily serve to affirm one’s commitment to institutional establishments, albeit with a renewed sense of an institution’s place and function in the world. Something like this occurred when John of Patmos received the vision that eventually became the book of Reve- lation, a text that has gone far in buttressing the church’s worldly significance. The prospective ends of revelatory vision, then, are not to be prioritized in ex- periences wherein exhilarating insight is acquired. Such ends are never prede- termined; we rarely are able to tell exactly where revelation will lead. Instead, the simple willingness to remain open and available to ecstatic vision wherever it might find us – be it on a New England common, a remote Aegean island, or in a Houston business park – should be prized above all. This, I submit, is the basic religio-political vision Malick casts with The Tree of Life. Inherent in this vision is also the prospect of religious-secular rapproche- ment. Augustinians and Emersonians stand to benefit from collaborating over their shared appreciation of the natural world as a site of potential revelation, and thus as a locus of extraordinary value that is worthy of protection. This lends a new significance to The Tree of Life’s final image – a bridge connecting two discreet land masses across a wide body of water (fig. 7). While much will continue to separate Augustinians from Emersonians on the nature of their po- litical commitments, to view The Tree of Life is nevertheless to acknowledge a vision of radical possibility, not just of reconciliation but of political promise and, ultimately, of hope. An important facet of this hope is that individuals, whatever their politics, might be restored to a meaningful relationship with the earth, and experiencing this, might also finally come together to protect it. 29 Emerson 1983, 270. Fig. 7: The bridge in The Tree of Life’s final shot (Terrence Malick, US 2011), 02:12:26. Narrative and Experiment, Religion and Politics in The Tree of Life | 183www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185