(Click to enlarge)
On Miracles
According to G. K. Chesterton, “The most astonishing thing about miracles is that they happen.” I think it was Evelyn Waugh who added: “Miracles happen, but it is presumptuous to anticipate them.”
I often ruminate on those two quotes when alone in my kayak. It sometimes seems that the miracles we pray for just don’t come about. For instance, a number of us recently prayed very hard that God would spare the life of a five-year old grandchild of a friend. We were all, as we said, praying for a miracle. When the child died, our immediate feeling was that the miracle had been denied us, but in retrospect we came to believe that God might have granted us another miracle rather than the one for which we prayed. It was apparently God’s intention to bring that child home very early for reasons known only to Him, but before He took the child another one was already growing in the womb of the mother – unexpectedly. That’s certainly something to think about.
I have prayed for miracles - major and minor – all my life, because of my strong belief in the miracles performed by Jesus in the New Testament. In fact, if not for the greatest miracle (the Resurrection), there would be no Christianity. If Jesus had not risen from the dead, and caused the Holy Spirit to come upon His apostles and confer on them the gift of tongues, the apostles would probably have gone back to being fishermen, and there would be no New Testament as we know it.
C. S. Lewis, in his book, Miracles (in which he deconstructs the arguments against miracles by Hume and others), declares The Incarnation (God becoming Man) the most important miracle for Christians (he calls it “The Grand Miracle”). He probably reasoned that had Jesus not been born, the rest of the miracles would not have happened, but surely the miracle of His birth and all the other miracles would have been questioned and doubted by the many who feared Him (and called for His crucifixion) had He not risen from the grave in three days as he promised. It was not until He rose from the dead that the people of that time (except for some, but not all, of His Apostles) recognized his Divinity. My opinion here is not meant as an argument against the view of C. S. Lewis (a fool’s errand if ever there was one), but merely as another view that evolved from other readings.
Anyone can pray for a miracle, but anticipating miracles as a result of our prayers is not a good idea, because God is in charge of miracles and He does as He sees fit. The miracles we pray for have to fit into God’s plan, and it is “presumptuous to anticipate them” whether they do or do not. That is exactly why the Nuns always taught us to pray that God’s will be done – not ours. We can, though, pray that the will of God will be what we pray for.
(On such things does one ruminate while paddling a one-person kayak miles out in the ocean - closer to God.)
