‘A Time of Miracles’ - Rev Adam Slate
/‘Miracle’ by Lisza Matyas
Some say 400 trillion to one.
But it’s hard to swallow the exact
Improbable sum
Of existence.
Of all the permutations
And calculations,
Of exact genetic combinations,
Ancestral observations,
Given Newtonian limitations,
Cosmic considerations,
Mathematical estimations,
And philosophical implications:
It’s almost impossible you even exist.
And yet
You’re here today.
You showed up.
Knowing. Glowing.
Taking in everything I say.
Your existence a miracle.
A mathematical improbability
Wrapped in the mystery
Of your inherent worth and dignity.
Nothing less than a miracle you’re alive.
A miracle you survived,
And are here with the will to choose-
Given the power of the gods
To create dance, story and song
With the same force
Which hung the stars in their silky twilight.
A miracle-
Without working, trying
Striving or thinking,
My heart keeps on beating
Keeps on going,
Keeps on flowing,
Oxygen and life to my blood and my bones.
A miracle-
I could stand in the middle of Trafalgar square,
No forest anywhere in sight,
Yet our flora is still giving me life.
My lungs keep on breathing,
Keep on going,
Keep on flowing
Oxygen and life to my blood and my bones.
A miracle-
A tiny seed splits forth
Suffocation of soil
To the light which does not toil.
A tiny seed which does not know
It has everything inside
To become the mighty oak.
A miracle-
No matter how much I resist,
I doubt, or close my heart,
Love always persists.
Pursues us and chooses us.
Right there at our door-
Full light, full force.
The moment we let just a little in,
Warming the face of our neighbor
Who asks how we’re doing.
In the echoes of children playing in the park,
Dogs wagging their tails,
And the friends
Who alway make room for
One more in their heart.
A miracle-
No matter what happens in this world,
Whether life is long or cut short,
How quietly or violently
Our story is told,
No matter how much division, loss or war,
There is one thing
We can count on to unfold:
The quiet shimmer of hope
Singing underneath it all…
Hope-
A subversion of Occam’s Razor,
Yet the only dream which moves us forward.
You are a miracle.
So what will you do
Knowing you won
This highly improbable,
Practically impossible
Intergalactic lottery?
You are a miracle.
Your life a mystery.
A mathematical improbability.
It’s true meaning kept from me.
But never, ever its beauty…
Shining so clearly for all to see.
Introduction
Beginning tonight for the next eight nights, Jews around the world will light candles in celebration of Chanukah, the Festival of Lights. According to the Chanukah story, a group of Jews called the Maccabees waged a war in Jerusalem against Greek/Syrian leadership that suppressed Jewish worship and desecrated the Temple by erecting an altar to Zeus. The Maccabees won the war, then cleansed and rededicated the holy Temple. They only found one container of oil to light the lamp in the Temple, enough for one day, but the oil burned for eight days, the Chanukah miracle we still celebrate.
In two weeks, we will be celebrating Christmas, commemorating the miraculous birth story of Jesus, the Christian ‘Messiah,’ which literally means ‘the anointed one’... someone not necessarily Divine, but described as having been sent by God to represent God's holy presence on Earth.
Types of Miracles
Miracles figure prominently in these holy days we celebrate at this time of year, but miracles are woven into major religious traditions in all sorts of ways. The central Jewish story of the Exodus from slavery involves God parting the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to escape from the Egyptians before closing the waters behind them, part of the Torah narrative of Jews as God’s chosen people.
In most Christian traditions, the messiah whose birth we celebrate at Christmas is described as having been raised from the dead after being crucified. This miraculous story is often where Christians draw their belief that love will prevail over secular power; or the belief that, while God does not orchestrate everything that happens in the world, God suffers along with humans when we suffer.
Islam tells of God—Allah—revealing the Qur’an to the prophet Mohammed (PBUH) over more than two decades as he prayed and meditated in a cave. This miraculous account underpins the belief of the Qur’an as a divinely authored text. Buddhism tells of the Buddha developing miraculous abilities through purification and devotion through meditation. Hindus speak of gods manifesting their power through miraculous acts.
And outside of religious traditions, humans sometimes characterise secular or natural events as miracles, such as when someone is rescued after having been lost at sea or other remote location, when someone recovers after a serious medical condition, or when a storm or tornado changes course at the last moment.
Sometimes the term ‘miracle’ is tossed around a bit casually. There's probably no Divine force picking political candidates or helping you get that job over someone else. God may not have helped Leicester City win the Premier League in 2016. But the way we invoke the term ‘miracle’ suggests the power that the idea has over us.
What Is a Miracle?
So what is a miracle? How unlikely does something have to be to constitute a miracle? Does an event have to defy million-to-one odds? Billion-to-one? Does it have to be something impossible in the scientific world? What does ‘impossible’ even mean? St. Thomas Aquinas called a miracle “whatever God does outside and beyond the order commonly determined or observed in nature.” But how do we know what’s outside of nature and what’s simply extremely rare? Do we need proof of some sort of Divine intervention before we call something a miracle?
A minister friend of mine told a joke once when I was visiting her congregation: A flood washed through a town and the waters were rising. A devout religious person was looking out the first floor window of their house that was surrounded by floodwater and someone came by on a raft. ‘Do you want a ride?’ they asked? ‘No,’ the person yelled back, ‘God will save me!’
The waters kept rising so the person moved up to the second floor and looked out the window there. Someone came by in a motor boat. ‘Do you need a ride?’ they asked? ‘No!’ the person yelled back, ‘God will save me!’
The waters kept rising so the person moved onto their roof. A helicopter flew over and someone yelled, ‘Grab the ladder and we’ll take you with us!’ ‘No thank you!’ the person shouted, ‘God will save me!’
The waters rose until they just about covered the person, who was now clinging onto their chimney. The person called in frustration, ‘God! Why have you abandoned me here? I had faith, and now I’m going to drown!’ And the clouds parted a little and a voice called back, ‘What do you mean? I sent a raft, a boat, and a helicopter! What more did you expect?!’
Problems with Miracles
It seems to me that any definition of a miracle that relies on whether something could or could not occur in nature is problematic because we do not always know what is possible. Science and reason evolve based on what we learn. The earth was at the centre of the universe until we worked out the details of celestial movement and figured out that it was not. We think there are a certain number of planets until we measure a wobble that shows that another one must be out there pulling on the others. We think an illness is not transmissible in a certain way until we see that it is. Or that an animal is extinct until we find one living in some remote area. We think there is a limit to how long someone can live with a disease, or how long a healthy human lifespan can be, or how prematurely a child can be born and survive to live a healthy life… until someone defies that understanding.
When I was a kid, science fiction was a person with a phone so small they could carry it around with them, or a device where we could see the person on the other end of the call. Or a car that could drive itself. We used to fantasise about talking animals, and now we know that even trees communicate with each other. Today, science is studying the idea of making things invisible. And it is likely that some day soon we will see woolly mammoths walking the earth after thousands of years. I would not pretend to guess at what is possible in the natural or scientific world.
In addition to not knowing what is possible in nature, there is a more theological issue of drawing a line between what occurs in nature and what is of Divine origin. One of the more interesting developments in Christianity was the Transcendentalist movement in the mid-1800s. The Transcendentalists contemplated a Christianity without miracles, asking whether Christian faith requires a belief that Jesus performed miraculous acts. They held that it was not necessarily to have faith in Divine miracles to be Christian, but rather that it was one’s Christian faith that might lead someone to believe in miracles.
Transcendentalists also emphasised the miraculousness of the natural world. They pointed out that nature is full of miracles we can see without having to understand or believe in an unseen deity. I think Lisza’s poem earlier would have resonated well with them!
Is a tree a miracle? The formation of a planet? The evolution of life on a planet?
We sometimes think we can explain these things with science, but trace them back far enough and at some point, that science breaks down. Scientists have developed the theory of the Big Bang to explain the creation of the universe: that the entire universe exploded from a singular infinitesimally small point at one moment in time, and everything we know, every star, every planet, every person, poured out from that moment. Is that really less miraculous than oil burning eight times longer than we thought? Is it really easier to believe than a woman becoming pregnant without there being a father? Compared to the Big Bang, these religious ‘miracles’ seem like fairly minor scientific improbabilities!
Lisza told us earlier:
It’s almost impossible you even exist.
And yet
You’re here today.
Eyes glowing, spirit shining,
Taking in everything I say.
A mathematical improbability.
So are we miracles? Are we inevitable? What’s even the difference?
Do We Need Miracles?
I wonder if we even have to answer these questions. I am aware that there can be a bit of religious anxiety around the question of miracles. What do we do with this idea that things happen outside of our control or understanding? Maybe it nudges us to think more theologically than we want.
Yet at the same time, we humans love this idea of miracles. They inspire us. Whether they are extremely rare occurrences, completely unexplainable, or even unclear whether they actually occurred, miracles give us hope that wonderful things can happen beyond our understanding. Beyond our imagination. It is what Lisza meant earlier when she said that:
No matter what happens in this world,
Whether life is long or cut short,
Or how quietly our story is told,
No matter how much war,
How much division, conflict or loss,
There is one thing we can count on to unfold:
The quiet shimmer of hope
Singing underneath it all.
This is what faith and religion give many of us. It is no wonder religion and miracles go together so well!
Conclusion
There is a lot about our sacred universe that we do not understand, and maybe it is fine to call those things miracles. What a shame to let the wonder get lost in conversations about science or theology. Maybe we need to worry less about whether one day of oil lasted for eight days and instead appreciate the resilience of a people whose history is filled with enduring slavery, displacement, and oppression. Maybe the stories about a child’s miraculous birth do not need to matter as much as how the child grew up to represent love and resistance to imperial violence for hundreds of millions of people around the world over thousands of years.
Lisza’s message reminds us that we are ‘miracles, our lives are mysteries… mathematical improbabilities whose true meaning is kept from us. But never, ever its beauty,.. shining so clearly.’ Miracles do not care if we believe in them or not. These mathematical improbabilities will keep happening regardless of what any of us calls them. And they will continue to fill the world with beauty.
What might it be like to be less concerned about whether we ‘believe in miracles’ and more open to the ways our world surprises us with its miraculous complexity? My hope is that we let ourselves find out.
Blessed be.
