The Mystery of the Miraculous

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”

C.S. Lewis

 My sister called to tell me to read the comments on cnn.com about Katherine’s interview with Sanjay Gupta.

Fascinating.

Some lovely, encouraging words.

And some unusual reactions.

Evidently, someone wrote an offensive comment that elicited strong responses. By the time I looked at it, the comment had been deleted. But the responses to the comment remained.

Debates broke out.

Everyone has told me that you simply cannot take anonymous comments seriously. Evidently, there are bored people who sit around all day expressing their opinions over the internet with no accountability.

Still, the debates that raged seemed to me to be a microcosm of the world in which we live.

The age-old conflict: Faith vs. Reason.

I will tell you one thing. No one I know was ever argued into faith.* 

They were loved into it.

To those who seriously seek, who knock and keep on knocking…

To those who lay down their arms and their need to be ‘right’…

To those who unbar the door, and bravely open it just a tiny crack…

Love comes flooding in, carried on a piercing flame of Light.

And that white-hot Light-borne Love melts the self-protecting shards of ice around a hardened heart.

The heavenly intersects with the worldly. The miraculous invades the mundane. The Light pierces the Darkness.

It still does.

The Light still shines in the Darkness. Even here. Even now. Today.

As it did on April 21, 2008.

For those who don’t know the whole story, my daughter Katherine should have died that night… according to the laws of nature.

She had a gargantuan AVM rupture. Massive bleeding in the worst possible part of the brain. Multiple aneurysms. Her cerebellum had actually begun herniating down into her spinal column by the time she got to the hospital.

They don’t usually operate when someone’s that far gone. Ask any neurosurgeon. About the best you can hope for in a case like that is that the patient will live the rest of his or her life out in a “persistent vegetative state.”

For some strange reason, one doctor made an unorthodox decision. Something compelled him to operate. To try to save a young mother’s life against all conceivable odds.

Someone told me recently that she died six times on the operating table. I’m glad I didn’t know that before. But I’m glad I know it now. It gives me an even deeper appreciation of what actually happened that night in Los Angeles, California. The City of Angels.

Love came down. Powerful love came pouring down as an energizing, healing force through the hands of skilled surgeons.

The primary neurosurgeon wept when he saw his patient the next day, and she squeezed his hand. Because, more than anyone else, he knew just how impossible that was.

Some of the assisting physicians came when they were off-duty just to look at her. To try to wrap their scientific minds around something they had never seen before.

The ICU nurses told us that no case had ever affected the doctors and staff at UCLA as Katherine’s case did. “They are really scientifically oriented,” one nurse confided, “so this is totally unusual.” New dialogues were begun. Searches started.

Because something impossible happened there.

A miracle.

C. S. Lewis defines miracle as "an interference with Nature by supernatural power."

It is from the Latin miraculum, meaning “object of wonder.”

In his seminal work, Miracles, he writes,

“…miracles, if they occur, must, like all events, be revelations of that total harmony of all that exists. Nothing arbitrary, nothing simply "stuck on" and left unreconciled with the texture of total reality, can be admitted. By definition, miracles must of course interrupt the usual course of Nature; but if they are real they must, in the very act of so doing, assert all the more the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level… In calling them miracles we do not mean that they are contradictions or outrages; we mean that, left to her [Nature] own resources, she could never produce them."

I was thinking about these things this morning when I picked up my Bible and started reading where I’d left off yesterday:

“The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby to be born will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God. What’s more, your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! People used to say she was barren, but she’s now in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.”” (Luke 1:35-37)

The mystery of miracles is decoded in the Ultimate Miracle, the incarnation.

God with us. God in us. Above us, below us, beside us.

The Creator of the laws of nature may bend or shape them as he will for his good purposes and plans.

He makes the impossible possible.

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Love came down at Christmas,

Love all lovely, love divine;

Love was born at Christmas,

Star and angels gave the sign.

Worship we the Godhead,

Love incarnate, love divine;

Worship we our Jesus:

But wherewith for sacred sign?

Love shall be our token,

Love shall be yours and love be mine,

Love to God and to all men,

Love for plea and gift and sign.

Christina Georgina Rosetti

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 “The supernatural is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing. Denial of it depends on a certain absent-mindedness. But this absent-mindedness is in no way surprising. You do not need -- indeed you do not wish -- to be always thinking about windows when you are looking at gardens or always thinking about eyes when you are reading.” CSL, Miracles

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(* except for scientists who start out to prove that God doesn’t exist, and logically and systematically argue themselves into belief. If you want to know examples of this, let me know and I’ll tell you a few stories.)