Do you believe in miracles?

1. I do not believe in miracles

To come up against a life-threatening problem (a self-destructive child, a friend with a terminal disease, a war that grows more barbaric daily) and then pray to God or one of the blesseds campaigning for sainthood to intervene and to do what is beyond our human powers to accomplish, may give me strength to act, but I would not wager on God to change reality. Therefore I tend to ignore reports of miraculous statues or miraculous interventions and treat them (as Rahner once put it) as one’s assent to the existence of, say China, if one has never been there. I don’t have a horse in that race.

I have never experienced a miracle in this sense, even though I expect some kind of reassuring, tangible presence of God in my life. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Theologically I can assert that or that “God knows when I sit and when I stand.” All life is in this sense a miracle. But does that claim not rob “miracle” of its distinctive meaning? In the day to day disjoined and frenetic experiences of life, the sense of God is a best very vague and rather distant.

The reality of God is a “miracle” in that in our scientific-technological-consumer world God does not have to be. To be able to transcend the limits of “satisfaction” and engage concretely in a life for others is a “miracle.” To break out of the false consciousness demanded by a “now” culture is a “miracle.” Miracle is best understood as being liberated by the Gospel and being able to take part in the Kingdom of God. In post religious culture, faith is a “miracle” in that through it God draws us into the reality of what we are not yet but strive for. “Miracle” is an experience that flows from rather than produces faith.

I can understand “miracle” as the life of faith, but not as actions of God that are just powerful or inexplicable along side of other kinds of inexplicable or impossible actions in our world. Miracles can’t be understood if, when they don’t happen, the seeker decides that there is not God or that God is not good. But most people who pray for miracles do not become worse or believe less when the desired action of God does not happen. If faith in God or the Church (Apologetics 101) depended on supernatural interventions that change natural relations and realities, I (and others) would have to be spectators viewing Christianity from outside.

2. A miracle in the family

My wife, Rosanne, and I have three children, a daughter and two sons and in July of 2009, our youngest – his name is Stephen – was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. We were devastated. A few days after his diagnosis, his three year chemotherapy protocol began.

Pray we did for three years and things were relatively smooth until May of 2012. Stephen began to get more lethargic. And then he got sick. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on until it was finally determined that his kidneys had been damaged from the chemotherapy. That summer, he was hospitalized twice and to make a long story short, he had to go through a kidney biopsy and some other tests to properly diagnose him.

...The next day, Rosanne brought Stephen to the lab for a previously scheduled blood test... All of a sudden, I felt that inner joy again and I remember thinking, “Why do I feel this way? I may be going home to the worst news of my life and I feel joyful.” It seemed very out of place. When I got home, my wife floated to the front door with a big grin on her face and said, “The hospital just called and his blood counts are normal.” Now we were having the best day of our lives.

3. My life is a miracle

I say this from the experience of facing death for leukemia in 1984. ...I woke up one morning in a youth hostel in London and literally felt like my heart was bursting out of my chest. My bone marrow was no longer functioning and my body was running on less than a quarter of the normal level of blood products. At the hospital the medical team explained that it was most likely that I would die. I received third degree internal burns from seven straight days of chemo and radiation therapy designed to destroy my immune system so that my body would accept my sister’s bone marrow.

The miracle that I am alive thirty years later is a miracle of medicine, of technology, and more deeply of human relationships and God’s presence. Perhaps I am a kind of modern day Lazarus. The miracle and grace of my bone marrow transplant, I believe, planted seeds of life in ways I would never have imagined. The entire process prepared me to embrace the rest of my life with a sense of humility and wonder at the whole of God’s creation. It prepared me for the work of my vocation to address death-dealing racism in the United States. It prepared me to unlearn my own white privilege and racism that was so deeply woven into my youthful sense of immortality and sense that I could do whatever I wanted.

4. Miracles are the daily bread of so many

When years ago I wondered about the belief in God, I turned to something I could believe: the love of my father. He was already dead, had been for many years. Yet asking him to bring peace where they was no peace "worked." Was that a miracle, or just ordinary restoration of faith that went away for awhile? I do not know.

Many unexplained events I – with a bit of sheepishness – attribute to my mother's intercession through her unfailing devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She has started dead batteries, found hopelessly lost items from car keys to computers to two expensive gift cards for which I had searched in every nook and cranny. There seems even to be a cause-effect link between the turn around of an abusive husband of a good friend. My husband, almost laughingly, suggested I pray to my mom. Most of these incidents have occurred after her death.
Do I believe in miracles? Well, no; but I do believe in my mother and father. Are they interceding for me and my paltry requests? Who knows for sure. I do believe in a loving God, experienced through others who have loved me. Are those miracles? Let the question stand.

5. I expect and count on miracles in my life

I have had the privilege of knowing a couple of saints around whom miracles seemed to abound, whether striking physical healings or, in the case of one, verified bilocations and elevations, multiplication of food...

The way I rationalize the possibility of miracles is that, if things are the way they ought to be (that is un-fallen, healed, whole) then it probably takes a great deal of effort to keep things fallen and broken, that is, out of alignment with the will of God. Viewed in those terms, sometimes it can be surprising for me when miraculous things don't happen. I asked a person in the healing ministry once why so many healings occurred on her trips overseas rather than here in the states. She replied that HERE people believe in health insurance, not miracles.
the problem of evil make believing in miracles an act of rebellion against what seems like reality. But, when, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, I remain open to the miraculous even in the inevitabilities of disease, death, and hardship, remarkable ways open up. The kingdom is always breaking in to this fallen world not in ways we would demand, but from a future where the laws of physics seem to be quite different.

6. The perspective and experience of a historical theologian.

As a Roman Catholic historical theologian, my fascination focuses on the historic human reporting of the miraculous. The subject is a source of fascination for undergrads and graduate students, and so it is important to tease out how one accounts for these reports of extraordinary manifestations of God's presence in the world that violate our experience of the physical universe? As a trained historian, I always emphasize that the "rules" of the discipline make it impossible to "prove" historically a miraculous event. Such events are fundamentally in the realm of faith and belief in a God who engages human experience in time and space. To illustrate my point, I tell my maternal grandfather's account of a miracle in his life when he was a young fundamentalist preacher.

In the mid-1920s, Grandpa was traveling in a Model-T Ford with another recent graduate from his class. As they traveled over the Rockies, the car overheated and the radiator water spilled out. Grandpa observed to his friend that if God could heal bodies, surely God could heal a car. So they knelt by the car radiator, laid hands on it, and prayed for God's intervention. Then as they had agreed, they would simply get in the car and drive to the next town (about 15 miles away). They made it to the next town, and pulled into the garage to seek help. The mechanic looked at their radiator, agreed that the radiator had cracked (because there was a scar-like seam that ran down it), but it was holding water, and the engine was working fine. They made the rest of the journey to NC without problems.
I believe the story to be "true" but then I ask students if that is an "historical" event. We talk about the way in which the account fits the plotline of many hagiographical accounts of miracles I help my students understand the distinction between the historic "reports" of the miraculous and the historic impact of those claims on the faith community. But I always emphasize the event itself remains in the realm of faith, and not "historically" verifiable ... because of the premises of the discipline of history.

In my own experience, the miraculous has been more prosaic. Seven years ago I was "presented" with an idea to start an education program in a prison... The miracle, for me, is that through these seven years I have discovered my vocation as a "theologian." I have lived the reality of Matthew 25, and discovered that when I go to prison, I come into the very presence of Christ, through men who have committed murder, rape, violence against women and children, and much more. I have found hope and promise in a place of despair and desolation. That is a miracle.

7. Are miracles like the moon made out of cheese?

As a small child, my grandmother told me that the moon was made out of green cheese... One day around noon, I was studying for a law-school exam and all of a sudden, I sat upright in my chair and was suffused with knowledge that my best friend was dead. I was filled with dread until an hour-and-a-half later the boy's father called to tell me that Jim and his brother had been killed in a plane-glider accident in California at the time that I received the telepathic message. Was that a miracle or in decades or centuries to come will science have more sophisticated knowledge of such matters?

I suspect that this conversation is taking place too early in human history. Remember the scholastics of the Middle Ages arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. (Saint) Pope John-Paul II informed the faithful that Hell was not a specific place. It is the absence of God. Poor Dante and his seven levels of Hell. Limbo and Purgatory are not places. Science says that the Homo sapien has been around for approximately 50,000 years. In the beginning everything was a miracle. Remember the days of the week, the months of the year, even feast days such as Easter. So much of our vocabulary was named after our early gods and their deeds. I believe the sensus fidelium is changing on this issue. Miracles and science are not in conflict according to the Church. We all remember the terrible uproar over Galileo's view that the planet Earth was not the center of the universe. The Church does not want to go through that again

8. Miracles happen all the time.

Miracles are about things that I do not fully understand. Life is a miracle. One moment there is an agonizing woman and the next moment there is a small child. It is like wow! To see my brother get struck with polio and I did not, that was a miracle. The first time I saw a television, I could not figure out how it worked. What a miracle! The first time that I used a copy machine was a miracle for me because I did not have to copy the page by hand. I still marvel at how light comes into a room with the magic of a little switch. To see a printed page come over a telephone fax was a miracle to me. To hold a so-called phone in my hand and watch information appear on a tiny screen is a miracle that I do not understand. Every pleasant day in Chicago is a miracle.

All these are everyday miracles of life, something that we do not fully understand. In the past, anything not understandable was considered to be the work of God. Thus we had sun and moon worshippers. We still pray for rain in agrarian societies. We pray for the sick and the dying, because we do not have control over the climate, disease or death, so we seek a higher power. The scientific approach of tearing things apart to see how they work has taken away from us the magic and beauty of a sunrise or sunset. After all, we all know the sun does not rise or set, but stands still as we the earth rotate around it. Still the beautiful and various colors of sunrises and sunsets are miracles.

Christian scripture, which includes the Hebrew writings of our Old Testament, cites many examples of miracles. Prophets called on Yahweh to heal or do such and such. Jesus performed miracles or signs to convince people of his power. In the past, holy men and women have performed miracles. Today, we ask faith healers to heal us. We are asking for miracles. We want miracles. Faith makes miracles possible. Otherwise, we will become mechanics trying to figure out how to do things ourselves or how they work. When we put ourselves in the hands of the higher power of God, Jesus, our Savior, miracles happen in our lives. Yesterday, I celebrated the 43rd anniversary of my miracle wedding with my beautiful wife Margaret.

9. I belief “that...” but cannot explain “how”

I refer to my twins, now 24 years old, as my miracle sons. They were born after a very intense period of premature labor that landed my wife in the hospital for a seven and a half week stay before giving birth to premature babies. It was a harrowing experience, but in the end, miraculously, our sons developed into healthy children. I could recount a number of similar, though less dramatic instances, when I experienced what I can only explain as divine or supernatural intervention in my life. However, I cannot say that I fully understand what happened in these situations and why it happened. Nor have my encounters with the miraculous given me a sense of when I might anticipate or predict how God makes God’s Self known in miraculous ways.

So, do I believe miracles? Yes, I do. I believe THAT God can and does act in miraculous ways in people’s lives. However, I do not believe that we can ever explain fully HOW miracles happen. Nor can we ever give definitive accounts of WHAT a miracle is or WHEN we should expect a miracle. Experiences of the miraculous remind us of the limitations of our abilities to experience and understand the world and of our ultimate dependence on God. We can talk about miracles, but we can never explain the miraculous fully. Like all gifts, miracles, when they happen, should be accepted with gratitude and shared with others. Beyond that, it seems to me, little more needs to be, or for that matter can be, said.

10. The teaching of St. Thomas about miracles

Note that Aquinas does not say that miracles are "contrary" to [contra] nature, but "outside" or "beyond" [praeter] the workings of nature (and therefore not contrary to, but simply beyond the scientific laws that describe those workings).

For centuries, there has been a remarkable cooperation between scientists and theologians on the question of miracles in the process of the canonization of saints. The process requires authenticated miracles, and the opinion of scientists is essential in that authentication.
In contemplating the reality of miracles, I think we need some humility regarding the limits of our knowledge of the natural world. I'd suggest Shakespeare: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (Hamlet).

11. Miracles in light of the Incarnation

The much-discussed issue whether miracles are possible without violating the laws of nature can in my judgment only be resolved if one rethinks what is meant by the doctrine of the Incarnation together with its implications for the overall God-world relationship.

Everything that Jesus said and did during his earthly life had both a natural/supernatural cause and a natural/supernatural effect. The natural and the supernatural were for him not separate states of being and activity but dynamically inter related processes or life-systems simultaneously at work within him. That is, Jesus in his divine mode of operation constrained his behavior as a human being; for, as the eternal Son of the Father, he felt obliged (though not physically compelled) to make the Will of his Father the guiding principle of his actions. But his divine mode of operation in life was strictly limited by the finite mode of operation characteristic of a male human being living at a definite time and place in the history of Israel and of the human race. So in his human consciousness he may never have thought of himself as working a miracle but simply as responding to a given situation with a sense of compassion and a desire to help others in their need.
Similarly for us, what counts as a miracle and what is highly unusual but in its own way still consistent with the known laws of nature is very often all but impossible to discern. Like Jesus but in a much more limited way, everything we say and do has both a natural/supernatural cause and a natural/supernatural effect. Only time in prayer and meditation will make clear to us which life-system, the divine or the human – both at work in us – had the upper hand in this or that situation. All this presumes, of course, that the proper God-world relationship should be some form of panentheism, everything finite existing in God but distinct from God in its own mode of operation (cf. my new book from Fortress Press entitled The World in the Trinity: Open-Ended Systems in Science and Religion).