Miracles are found in most every religious tradition. In Christianity, Jesus is said to have healed the sick, turned water into wine, and raised Lazarus from the dead. The Jewish people had their own history with miracles. The Red Sea parting to allow Israelites to escape captivity in Egypt provides one outstanding example. Common sticks also turned into snakes with some regularity during the same time period. The stories of Buddha’s life that are told and retold lend to the child, the young man, and the monk many miraculous feats.
Almost all founders of religious communities are said to have exhibited the sincerity of their divine mission through the miracles they performed. This makes sense to a hardheaded skeptic like me. Imagine the captivating personality of the most spiritually aware person you have ever met. Consider how the personality of Jesus, Moses, or Buddha might have shone with the fire of their spiritual passions. Consider how difficult it might be to translate this glowing energy of life to people to people who’d never met them. Perhaps the only way to convey the compelling genius behind the religious movement would be to tell of healing, water-walking, and flying through the air.
The trouble I have with miracles is not that they are signs trying to speak about an ineffable religious genius, but, that so many of the miracles I’ve heard about seem to come from the same place that inspired the poet Robert Lax to write:
“praise god thought he’s no place in any
astronomic seating plan,
sing still his might for still he can
wreak havoc on the race of man
he still can shrug the earth a bit
to make your standing towers sit
and quite destroy your joules and volts
with mediocre thunderbolts
he still can tear your towns apart
while his surrealistic art
grows grass where hitler’s moustache grows
and ferns from hirohito’s toes
fills frank sinatra’s mouth with ashes
and springs a toad from garbo’s lashes
and with some slight celestial mayhem
destroys the shrines of martha graham
and porter cole and coward noel
and splits the earth from pole to pole
or with some ray you haven’t found
sink dante’s hellshaft underground
sing still his might for still he can
wreak havoc on the race of man”
If I believed in miracles, I would not be attracted to displays of wrath or misplaced might.
If I believed in miracles, I’d know which manifestations of divine power deserved my faithful attention. Oryen Kusum Lungpa, a Tibetan monk, knows the right miracles to pursue. He asserts that “Flying in the sky, going under the ocean, going through rocks and things like that are minor powers...Many great teachers have flown, caused storms in rainbows, or died leaving no body...But if you have the Ultimate Quality then just by snapping your fingers you can become one hundred images of yourself. That kind of miracle is very high.”
If I believed in miracles, I‘d make it my business to know what are the sources of and impediments to miracles. I would consider that miracles belong to certain ages of human experience. Eliezer Shore, a Jew, teaches: “The Jewish nation in its youth witnessed the miracles of the Exodus and the desert journey...But as time passed the miracles were hidden and the nation had to progress on its own, to learn the difficult job of serving God in the land.” If one age produces more miracles than another, I’d want to understand the difference to comprehend my era.
If I believed in miracles, I wouldn’t care that don’t address the needs of thousands and million who suffer on in their presence. I would note, but, wouldn’t mind that Jesus raised one man, Lazarus, and not the thousands of others who died in the years of his public ministry. I wouldn’t care that other miracle working sages like Kusum Lingpa only intervene in one or two or three deaths in the whole span of their careers. Neither would I worry that miracles often seem poorly timed. I wouldn’t ask why the god of the Israelites failed to produce a miracle that prevented the Israelites being taken into slavery instead of waiting all those long years to part the Red Sea. And, I wouldn’t ask why wasn’t there a miracle that prevented millions of Africans from being taken into slavery? Or, a miracle preventing the evolution of Hitler’s horrible final solution for the Jews, homosexuals, and dissenting Christians? If I believed in miracles, miracles that are ‘too little, too late’ wouldn’t bother me.
If I believed in miracles, I wouldn’t scrutinize them for effectiveness. I wouldn’t ask, “What happens to people raised from the dead? Don’t they die later anyway?” I wouldn’t worry that some miraculous apparitions like bleeding statues seem to create a only a momentary stir. I wouldn’t wish for a count of the lives wholly changed after witnessing such a miracle.
If I believed in miracles, I wouldn’t want them watered-down either. Water down a miracle and you end up with something called a ‘miracle mile’, which we all know is just a stretch of road where hundreds of cars are sold each weekend. If you shrink a miracle too much you get a phrase like, “It’s a miracle I got here,” breathlessly offered by a late arrival, who merely had to surmount a traffic jam.
The root meaning of the word ‘miracle’ is ‘wonder.’ Miracles that capture my curiosity are the accessible miracles that inspire wonder. Miracles that are personal because they touch us profoundly and cause heartfelt reactions. Miracles that inspire not just wonder, but, joy and awe. Miracles that draw us further into a deepened awareness of life.
The root behind ‘wonder’ is the word ‘smile.’ Smiles are a part of our earliest activities. Then, as we grow we come to know the miracle of being in a social existence, and our awareness grows with us, until we come to know the miracle of being completely inside one body and yet deeply touched by the life of another human being.
If I believed in miracles, my miracles would grow out of the surprising, smile-inducing events of life. Most, if not all, of them would arise in wonder, not fear. They would describe a world filled with awe, not an awful world. Those miracles might well be smaller than your average miracle. No one would be raised from the dead. Seas might never part at human command. Thunderbolts might only signal an advancing cold front.
If I believed in miracles I would marvel at the miracles Walt Whitman described: “...honey bees busy around the hive...animals feeding in the fields...or the wonderfulness of the sun-down - or of the stars, shining and bright...or the admirable sight of the perfect old man, or the perfect old woman, or the sick in hospitals...These, with the rest, one and all are to me miracles.”
If I believed in miracles I would include the kind of miracle Jim Cary described in his essay, Believing. For him a dream, with religious and spiritual import, was a miracle that became a true fact of his waking life. A dream that left him “more open and less opinionated than my habitual self-construction.” All of us who’ve tried to change ourselves know that only miracles make such reconstructions of self possible. These are the miracles I believe in easily, one after another as I am witness to them.
Perhaps the truth is I do believe in miracles. I believe in the miracles that attentiveness brings us in nature and in social relations. I believe in the miracles of inclusion that reveal our place in the grand scheme of life and remind us we are not alone. I believe miracles that change one’s attitude toward life, without question, or only for one day, or even one hour of one day. Those other miracles, the ones that topple natural laws, those I still have some trouble understanding.
