BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—MIRACLES [F, 12-13-24—Happy Friday, the 13th]
I don’t know why I’m going to write about miracle here, because I can’t say anything intelligible about miracle. Miracle is ineffable, unexplainable. But we use the word miracle a lot at Christmas time, like every sappy TV show or movie has someone exclaiming, “It was a Christmas miracle!” Well, yes, it’s probably accurate to describe Christmas, itself, as miracle.
I don’t mean the appearance of angels or of a navigational star or why the cookies left for Santa disappeared. The presence of God incarnate is miracle.
I do believe in miracles. I just don’t think we can understand them. We know that God is involved with them somehow, but we don’t understand that, either.
Miracles are not like tube sox. One size does not fit all. That is probably the only thing that can be said about miracles, for each one stands alone and cannot be explained.
Please don’t give me that talk about every sunrise being a miracle, and every day I’m alive is a miracle, and every rose petal is a miracle. I understand. We need to be reminded of how precious each moment of life is. But that’s just flattening out the word “miracle.”
Miracle is singular, even when plural.
Because we are people, though, we try to organize miracles. We talk about different categories of miracles. Miracles of healing. [So why did God heal you and not someone else?] Miracles of nature. [The tornado flattened every other house but spared mine; it was a miracle. Yeah, tell that to the neighbors with the flattened houses.] Miracles of chance. [If I’d been there two seconds later…] Miracles of clarity. [Suddenly I understood the meaning of life…] Miracles of…
No, there is not category of Miracle, nor are there miracles. There is only miracle, something that stands alone. It can’t be explained. It can’t even be talked about intelligibly.
Imagine that you are going through the woods and find a cairn. You wonder who piled those rocks up, and why. You call in the cops to dust for finger prints. You call in the anthropologists to determine if it bears the marks of the Ojibway who once lived here. You call in the geologists to look at the rain wear patterns to determine how long it’s been there. You call in the sociologists, who say it’s from a period in history when people liked rocks. You call in the psychologists who say, Yes, that’s the work of a rebellious teen girl who is mad because only boys get to pile rocks up.
You get all sorts of information, but you still don’t know who did it, or why.
That’s the way with a miracle. It stands alone. We don’t know who or why. And that just rankles, doesn’t it? As soon as I’ve said that, I want to go on, to explain in words why we can’t understand it in words.
I have myself been part of two incidents which I describe as miracles. I want so much to explain them, put them into context, place them in proper theological and psychological setting. In that desire, I have written about them and told their story…
That’s what you can do with a miracle—tell its story. You can’t explain it, but stories don’t require explanation. They require only presence.
Well, don’t blame me for wasting your time. I warned you at the top that I can’t say anything about miracles.
John Robert McFarland
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