Walker Percy on Christianity and Narrative

From "How To Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic" (1984):

The Christian ethos sustains the narrative enterprise in ways so familiar to us that they can be overlooked.  It underwrites those very properties of the novel without which there is no novel:  I am speaking of the mystery of human life, its sense of predicament, of something having gone wrong, of life as a wayfaring and a pilgrimage, of the density and linearity of time and the sacramental reality of things.  The intervention of God in history through the Incarnation bestows a weight and value to the individual human narrative which is like money in the bank to the novelist.