“There was nothing special about the day. It was another ordinary day,” Kelly concludes. “I was reborn into ordinariness. But…” Here Kelly’s voice breaks audibly, as if he is fighting tears until finally he lets out the story’s closing words with a small sob: “What more could one ask for?”
After a beat, Glass provides a coda about what became of Kelly. “Nearly two decades after that happened,” Glass says, “Kevin Kelly is now the executive editor of a magazine about the future, Wired Magazine.” Like a puzzle piece dropped into place, identifying Kelly this way highlights the apparent contradiction of the editor of a forward-looking technology publication choosing to tell this story on a self-consciously nostalgic radio show. Only then does the listener realize that the conversion narrative just experienced through Kelly was not what was expected. As framed by Glass, Kelly’s story is not of a conversion into belief, but out of it, a rebirth “into ordinariness.” Kelly begins with confusion, finds faith, and then moves beyond it. The narrative arc of religion on This American Life may run through particular beliefs, but it ends with the non-sectarian sanctification of the everyday.
In this and in other religion stories featured on This American Life, it is clear that Glass is not after Come-to-Jesus moments. The point of Kelly’s story was not to tell how a young man found God. Rather, Glass creates radio experiences that, in current NPR lingo, have become known as a “Driveway Moments”: suspenseful epiphanies that forge such a bond through the airwaves that the listener cannot pull away. As explained on NPR.org: “What is a Driveway Moment? You’re driving home, listening to a story on NPR. Suddenly, you find yourself in your driveway. Rather than turn the radio off, you stay in your car to hear the piece to the end.” A Driveway Moment occurs when one wants nothing more than to be alone with the radio.
As ordered as any liturgy, This American Life leads inevitably to this kind of communion. As Glass once explained:
This is the structure of the stories on our show: There’s an anecdote, a sequence of events. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And the reason why that’s powerful… is because there is something about the momentum, especially in a medium where you can’t see anything… that you just want to know what happens next. It’s irresistible…
Then, there’s the part of the story where I make some really big statement like, “There’s something about the kindness of strangers.” Because you can’t just have an anecdote. It’s got to mean something. You can have people read the little story from the Bible, but unless you tell them, you know, the lesson they’re trying to draw from it, it’s not a real sermon.
A Driveway Moment is a perfect cocktail of anecdote and meaning. Considering that the creation of such moments has also become a measure of a radio program’s success, it may be that while broadcast technology promises to relieve one type of isolation, it simultaneously increases another. “The mission of public broadcasting,” Glass once said, is “to tell us stories that help us empathize and help us feel less crazy and less separate.” It may be that stories of other people’s lives can be told so well that we never need to leave the car to hear them.
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