Long Live Miracles!

An aunt of mine was a great one for miracles. Her life was filled with them. Everything that worked out to her satisfaction was 'a miracle'. I was very fond of my aunt, and fortunately, although sometimes I found this attitude a bit irritating, I had the sense to hold my peace and not to challenge her interpretation of the miraculous.

Because I always felt that she had a point. She didn't look for the supernatural in her miracles. She was filled with wonder and gratitude at the ordinary events of everyday life, and the smallest occurrences that influenced her life for good gave her cause to marvel. She was a happy woman until the day she died.

And yet, looking back, I think the cause of my irritation was that I felt she was too easily satisfied. Her miracles were trivial affairs - the arrival of a letter two days after she had thought of the writer, or a neighbour offering to mow the grass when she was ill. Things such as these were undoubtedly cause for gratification, but if your sense of the miraculous starts on a scale like this, it doesn't leave you much room to measure the truly miraculous. My aunt was right to be so appreciative of the good things in her life, but she was wrong to call them miracles. There can be no such thing as a superficial miracle.

A miracle, surely, is an occurrence that can't be explained by any form of human reckoning. So, because we always seek for explanations, we resort to religious terminology, and say the inexplicable must be the result of divine intervention. People can't work miracles. Miracles are the preserve of God.
In times past, so little was known about science and the laws of cause and effect that miracles carried credibility. If you believed in a God who was in control of the world and everything in it, it made sense for this divinity to intervene from time to time, re-arranging things and putting them to rights. Such divine intervention could be extremely useful on several levels - not alone could it get you out of a hole, but it could reinforce your belief, and of course it could also demonstrate to the rest of the world that your God was better than other gods, and worth backing.

The Bible is full of stories of such instances - think of the Old Testament account of the delivery of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt. Miraculous 'signs' were given to Moses at every step of the way, beginning with the burning bush, and the rod which turned into a serpent and back again; then later came the plagues which were visited on the Egyptians, the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, the appearance of water and manna in the desert, and so on. Think too of Daniel in the lion's den, or in the burning fiery furnace, as he emerged each time unscathed, against all the laws of possibility. Or take some of the myriad miracles from the New Testament - Jesus walking on the water, the feeding of the five thousand, or the miraculous events which have been accepted into the canon of orthodox Christianity such as the virgin birth, the transfiguration of Christ, or indeed the resurrection itself, the ultimate in miracles and the very keystone of orthodox Christian belief.

Our civilisation, influenced as it is by the Bible and based on two thousand years of Christian thought, has been brought up on miracles. Very few people questioned the circular thought-process, which claimed that God must be God (and Jesus must be the Son of God) because they had worked miracles, and at the same time miracles must be miraculous because they had been wrought by God. Until comparatively recent times, there was nothing to say that these things could not have happened.
Unfortunately, though, belief in miracles was to end in tears. The world developed increasingly rapidly. Knowledge advanced by leaps and bounds. Scientific discovery showed that the world is shaped not by a God who 'knows best', but by chemical and physical and genetic forces which are answerable to no one but themselves. The Age of Enlightenment had moved human reason to the battlefront, and the God of supernatural signs and miracles began to beat a retreat.

But he did not go easily, and he has not gone altogether. So deep-rooted is our human need for security and comfort that some schools of thought could not part with the idea of an interventionist God who would - somehow, and against all the odds - make things all right in the end. The alternative was too horrifying to contemplate. Miracles were 'proof' that such a God existed, that we were safe, and everything was part of a plan. And just as these schools of thought - or religions - have clung to the hope that a God with miraculous powers was still in charge, so countless individuals have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by such thinking.

There have of course been many courageous exceptions. Those who were intelligent enough, honest enough, and brave enough, rejected the 'magic' element of religion as impossible, and sometimes paid dearly if they did it publicly. The fore-runners of Unitarianism were among these people: Faustus Socinus (to quote from George Chryssides' recent book The Elements of Unitarianism) taught that: 'Jesus saved men and women, not by some mysterious atoning transaction which was accomplished on the cross, but rather by his life and example, which people might follow', and in 1598 public reaction against him was so violent that he had to flee for his life. That's all very well, we may say, but Socinus lived 400 years ago. Yet only two or three years have passed since a bishop in the Church of England caused a public outcry by suggesting that the story of the virgin birth need not be taken literally. Many people, it would seem, still love and need magic and miracles, and still look to religion to provide them.

This is what (to my way of thinking) gives religion a bad name. We aim to encourage independent thought in our schools, we reward the exercise of intelligence, we extol the virtue of honesty. These qualities are considered fundamental requirements in the direction of every institution and organisation, and indeed in every individual life. Yet these very qualities of independent thought, intelligence, and honesty seem to be actively discouraged, not to say forbidden, by much of orthodox religion. One wonders who is kidding whom, and why.

A lot of the problem stems (I think) from literal interpretations. And this is not altogether our fault. We are the product of our culture, and our culture has to a very large extent trained us to interpret things literally. Partly perhaps because of the influence of Greek philosophy on Western thought, we have been encouraged to believe that if a thing is not true literally, then it can't be true at all. Because we are so confident - so sure that our way of thinking is not just the right one, but also the only one - we follow our path of rational inquiry and we put everything to the tests that it imposes. Science tells us that a body which has a specific gravity heavier than water will sink. Therefore Jesus could not have walked on water. Water and wine have different chemical formulae. Therefore the wine at the wedding feast in Cana must have been there all the time. The feeding of the five thousand was possible because the generosity of the little boy with the loaves and fishes shamed everyone else into producing what they had, and so it could all be shared out and everyone had plenty. And so on.

It seems to me that this exclusively explanatory approach to miracles is a pitfall into which Unitarianism is particularly prone to fall. Because our religious outlook is firmly based on a spirit of rational inquiry, could it not be that we sometimes carry this to extremes? Carefully, we remove the miraculous element from miracle after miracle, because we know that Jesus, who we believe was only human like the rest of us, could not have done them. And we have too much respect for the laws of science to accept that God would have stooped to them. Who, after all, could have much faith in a God who could create this wonderful world in which we live and then flout the way that it works, at will, just to gain a point or two. So we tend to by-pass the Old Testament miracles, and when we read the New Testament we end up with a sanitised interpretation of the Gospels, and risk missing the whole point.

I often think of something my friend Clare said to me once. Clare is a feminist Roman Catholic nun, a wise and intelligent woman, who taught for many years in Nigeria and the Middle East. She was talking about the difference of approach between children from different cultures. 'If you tell a story to a western child', said Clare, 'he or she will ask "is it true?" But if you tell the same story to an eastern child you will be asked, "what does it mean?"' I wonder if perhaps we need to learn to think more like eastern children.

Their attitude sums up what seems to me the essential thing, that is so easy for us to forget, about the Bible. The Bible is a collection of eastern writings, written for eastern sensibilities. Except for the parts about the Mosaic Law, it was never meant to be taken literally. The Jews, wiser that we are in this respect, know this and so they don't suffer from hang-ups over the literal interpretation of the miracles in the Moses story, or any other story. They recognise a story for what it is: a way of narrating events to illustrate a point, to cement a tradition, to reinforce or restore a faith, to convey a psychological meaning. And so they recognise the miracles within the story for what they are - constant pointers to the presence of God in the unfolding drama of the Hebrew people. Miracles give credence to the narrative - rather like the explanation offered by Pooh-Bah in The Mikado - you will remember that Pooh-Bah was the Lord High Executioner - when he was describing one particularly significant execution he said that after it the victim's head stood on its neck and bowed three times to him - this incident was, he said, 'corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative'.

The miracles in the New Testament were written down sooner after they 'happened' than those in the Old Testament, but they too went through a preliminary refining process of telling and re-telling. There are inaccuracies in the stories - accounts of the same miracle sometimes differ from one gospel to another. Written at least partly for a specific teaching purpose, so that those who read them would believe that Jesus was 'the Christ', they are a mixture of memory and meaning. As a little Bible Dictionary I have puts it:' It is important to use the aid of scholarly research and one's own thoughtful mind to come to some understanding of the making and meaning of the miracle stories of the Gospels. Trust in Jesus . . . is one thing; trust in the verbal details of the Gospel accounts may be another'.

Does all this mean that the modern world has no room for miracles, that they are outworn concepts and have to be discarded? By no means! A world without miracles would be a poor place indeed. The course of history, and current events all over the world, show us many - too many - examples of inexplicable bad things that happen. We need to give space to the inexplicable good things, and allow ourselves to focus on those.

In his lovely poem Inversnaid, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left . . . . .
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Well, I would say 'long live miracles - let them be left!' People take enough knocks in their lives. Let's hold on to miracles. We need them.

First of all we need the miracles in the Bible. We need to recognise them for what they are, and use them as they were meant - aids to our understanding of the ancient world as revealed in the Old Testament, and, in the New Testament, a means by which our comprehension of life can be enlarged and our spiritual development enriched. The blind man in Mark's Gospel may indeed have received his sight at the touch of the Great Healer. But whether he did or he didn't, surely the story stands as a parable for the way in which scales can fall from one's eyes, thereby enabling one to become spiritually aware? I don't for a minute think that Jesus walked on water. Whether it was a trick of the light or pure invention doesn't matter a jot. My spirit is uplifted by the image, and when I think of it I am reminded that what seems impossible can sometimes be accomplished. I don't know if a star shone over a stable in Bethlehem in the year B.C.4 or A.D.6 or whenever the birth of Jesus is calculated to have (possibly) taken place. There may have been a unique alignment of two planets that year or there may not. I don't think we need to know. But I believe in that star, and I've hitched my wagon to it. It's still shining on the world, although the world seems to be having increasing difficulty in seeing it. But we get a renewed chance to focus on it every Christmas. I don't believe that angels appeared to the shepherds on the hills above Bethlehem. But I listen to those angels and their message of love and hope for humanity and I know it's the only answer. I don't 'believe' the resurrection story. But I celebrate it every Easter. What a story! What a way of illustrating the eternal resurgence of life, the renewal of birth after death, the ultimate triumph of good over evil.

Our sense of the miraculous restores our faith in possibility and human potential. It keeps our minds humble and open to the wonders of what is still inexplicable. It also preserves in us the ability not to take things for granted. It seems to me that we can live comfortably on two levels: on one level we can understand (or try to!) the ways in which the world works, and on the other we can marvel at their miraculous effects. We can marvel, too, at inner miracles, the ones that have nothing to do with science. Think, for example, about Gordon Wilson's instant and obviously genuine forgiveness of the Enniskillen bombers who killed his beloved daughter, Marie. Surely there's a touch of the miracle about that? Or think of the extraordinary patience, selflessness, courage, humour, of which people can be capable, often coping with, or rising above, adverse circumstances in a way which onlookers find impossible to understand.

It's not miracles themselves we need to deconstruct. We just need to let the scales fall from our eyes, to look at them in a different way, and then we can see them more clearly.

Anyone who can do that will then be able, in the words of William Blake:
To see a World in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.

We are indeed surrounded by miracles. We just have to recognise them - that's all

Jennifer Flegg