Miracles and Wonders
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A man arrives at a wedding banquet and finds that they have run out of wine. Mysteriously, plain water is transformed into wine sufficient for all the guests.
A woman with third-degree burns is scheduled for skin graft surgery by a famous doctor well known for treating burn cases of movie stars. Before the surgery she is persuaded by a friend to let a group of people experimenting in alternative healing techniques work on her. Figuring she has nothing to lose, she lies down on a table, and they practice what they call energy techniques, waving their hands in the air over her for an hour or so. When she gets up the pain is vastly diminished, and by the next morning, the burns are gone. The burn doctor, when he examines her and hears her explanation, becomes very upset and declares that there is no way that it could have happened.
A young woman, in deep depression and despair over the conditions of her life, decides to drown herself. As she heads down the beach toward the cold waters of the lake she hears a voice speaking words of comfort to her and feels restrained from carrying out her grim purpose. There is no one else there on the beach.
Do you believe any of these stories? Do you believe that any of these stories describe miracles? Does it matter to your evaluation of them that the first story is about Jesus, that the second is related by a journalist responding to an author’s call for input for his book on miracles, and that the third was the experience of a friend of mine, someone I believe to be trustworthy and who had no reason to make up the story—and who, indeed, could well have worried that I would disbelieve her or think she was nuts.
What do we, who are presumably rational, well-educated people, do with the concept of the miraculous?
After all, the Unitarian tradition is not steeped in devotion to the miraculous. Our heroes are people like Clara Barton, who accomplished great feats of healing through the plain human hard work of nursing the ill, improving conditions of sanitation, and founding what became the Red Cross. We are solidly linked to the enlightenment tradition of philosophers like David Hume, who argued that since sensible people base their opinions on the weight of evidence—believing most strongly in those things which have the most supportive evidence—and since miracles, by their very nature, go against the laws of nature, therefore the sensible person will not believe in miracles, as the evidence against them will always be greater than any evidence that they exist.
As Unitarians we are the direct descendants of Transcendentalist Theodore Parker, who argued that the miracles of the New Testament were essentially irrelevant in their purpose of proving the divinity of the Christ. The teachings of Christianity, he argued, must be true in and of themselves to be worth following, and not depend on the authority of the man who revealed them any more than the truths of geometry depend on the personal authority of Archimedes.
And yet, and yet, our faith tradition also goes back just as solidly to Universalist George DeBenneville, who believed that the truth of universal salvation was revealed to him by angels in the course of a near-death experience. We are the inheritors of the early Universalist John Murray, who was led by either miraculous intervention or a series of really amazing coincidences from an English debtor’s prison to the doorstep of an American farmer who was praying for the arrival of a Universalist preacher.
So what do miracles have to do with us: contemporary, sensible, Unitarian Universalists with open minds and a distaste for the gullible?
I have a considerable degree of ambivalence about this subject. I am leery of miracles and angels as the subject of TV shows, and impatient of miraculous images of Jesus appearing on tortillas or car fenders. After all, how do we know what Jesus looked like? I have a hard enough time recognizing people I’ve met when I bump into them at the grocery store. You can just bet I wouldn’t have a clue whether someone was Jesus or not if I happened to see a face in the clouds. Besides, what seems to be our society’s obsession with miracles often feels a little too close to the American need for a quick fix. Got a problem? Just stand back and God or your guardian angel will fix it up in a jiffy, whether you need a parking place or a medical cure.
Whatever miracles may be, I am sure that they do not take the place of the day-to-day work of dealing with reality as we know it. I am charmed by the story of the Buddha meeting someone who has practiced meditation for twenty years and now can walk on water. Buddha says: “Why didn’t you just pay three rupees and take the ferry across?”
Any miracle worth its salt, as far as I’m concerned, provides an invitation not to wallow in spookiness, but to turn to a deeper, more aware, engagement with the things of this world. The Greek of the New Testament refers to miracles by two words most accurately translated as signs and wonders.
A miracle is something that points, as a sign, beyond itself. And it inspires wonder or awe. In some sense, then, the presence of miracles in the world depends on our willingness to find meaning and wonder in what we see.
“There are only two ways to live your life,” wrote Albert Einstein. “One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”
And why not live in a world of miracles? George Howe Colt writes in a Life magazine article on angels about talking with someone who runs “angel awareness” seminars. This person teaches people to watch for subtle clues of angelic presence, such as pennies on the sidewalk, feathers in the air, the tinkling of bells, the flickering of lights. While acknowledging his skepticism, Colt also notes, “It feels pleasant to be on alert for angels—as opposed to, say, muggers.” As with angels, I suspect that it feels better to be on the lookout for miracles than for muggers. Living as if everything is a miracle might lead one to feel, like Colt, “more aware, more hopeful, more open to the possibility of magic. And, he adds, “the idea that serendipitous details of daily life might be tell-tales of some larger presence is alluring.”
Alluring, indeed. I suspect that the abiding appeal of miracles has less to do with any proof of divine powers given to a particular individual (such as Moses or Jesus) than with the prospect that the divine continues to show itself in our time and place—that however alienated or alienating the world may be, we are still deeply loved and noticed, even to the point of natural laws being pushed aside for our benefit.
The Christian theologian C.S. Lewis speaks of the natural world as a kind of sphere that is pierced by the divine, where miracles happen when God invades the natural world, and nature moves over to accommodate it. I don’t entirely agree with Lewis, and I can’t say that I particularly care for the idea of a supernatural God shooting miraculous arrows through the fabric of nature. But I’ve heard enough miracle stories—stories not only wonderful but also scientifically unexplainable—to suspect that science as we currently understand it might fail to capture the whole picture. In the same way that miracles in the Bible not only provide for the comfort or survival of their recipients, but also serve to point to an engagement of the divine in the world, I suspect that the various ordinary miracles many of us witness serve to point toward a deeper reality. In a world where the prevailing attitude so often seems to be “Get yours and hang on tight before someone tries to take it from you,” miracles might offer a nudge to consider that “you” and “yours” could be relative terms, that our lives might be much more difficult to disentangle from one another than we generally think.
If nothing else, whether you believe that God reaches in from outside the world, or that the universe is made of threads of connection that twist themselves to help place us where we need to be, or whether you trust in the plain laws of cause and effect, the notion that miracles of connection take place can serve as an invitation both to make miracles and to find them.
In gifts of presence and compassion, in the work of justice and mercy, we can make miracles any time we like. With an open mind and a heart tuned to receive, we might even find that miracles happen to us all the time as well. Given that we’re more likely to find what we look for, I’d rather look for miracles than muggers any day.
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