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74 Media and religion in transition

It is the general situation of a person recognizing how deeply
embedded he or she may be within a tradition, yet confronting the fact
that the inner life may not be fully formed or contained by tradition as
received, and that by pulling together from other sources, often
resources neglected from within one’s own tradition, new and enriched
meanings are possible. The believer is thrust into the situation, of the
bricoleur, who in cobbling together from a variety of imageries,
doctrines, symbols, texts, moral codes, and spiritual disciplines finds
new religious meaning and in so doing often discovers a nuance, an
insight, an angle of vision that is revitalizing in its creativity. 104

This introduces another dimension to the “quest,” and one that is signifi-
cant to our project here. That is the sense that accompanies these “quests,”
that there are resources or insights available that may well have been
repressed by received tradition. To the extent that these resources might be
more available outside those boundaries, or even within the popular-
cultural marketplace, gives the project of seeking, understanding, and
integrating things from a variety of sources and contexts additionally satis-
fying. Elsewhere, I have discussed the range of these “repressed modes” of
religious experience, suggesting a list that includes “the visual,” the body,
objects, ritual, music, and “experience” itself. 105 There is a wide range of
symbolic and other resources available in the media sphere that invoke
these modes of experience. For the individual quest that sees itself moving
beyond received traditions that may have repressed or underemphasized
one or more of these modes, finding cultural resources to right that wrong
introduces another level of vitality to that quest.
We need to keep in mind, at the same time, that whatever resources are
encountered in the mediated public sphere, they themselves have histories,
histories that are often rooted in religious traditions of a variety of kinds.
Neither the project, nor its outcome, should be seen as something entirely
novel. As Roof cautions us,

the spiritual dynamics of the self are extraordinarily complex. It is
even more complex still. For despite all that we have said about spiri-
tuality as an individual matter, it involves meanings, symbols,
practices, and processes born out of, and shaped by, communal life
and the confrontations of modernity and religious tradition; and for
this reason, spirituality cannot be thought of simply as a matter of
individual choice. 106
What is novel, though, is the way each individual brings together resources
into her own identity, into what I call her “plausible narrative of the self.”
We will get to this in more detail in the next chapter, but it is important for
us to keep straight the difference between the received discourses and