Words are Medicine

"There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle;              you can live as if everything is a miracle."

Albert Einstein

For the vast majority of our time on Earth we have known very little about the nature of our universe–neither its dimensional extent nor its essential “nature” so to speak; whether it is causative or caused or neither. We’re here, but we don’t know why or exactly how or even where “here” is.

So for thousands or millions of years (depending upon whom we ask) we saw the universe as a spectacle of miracles, where everything to us was in itself supernatural. Because it was all incomprehensible everything was not just imbued with mystery, it was Mystery itself. Without a philosophical or scientific prism with which to look at the world, it was not an accident of random majesty but Majesty itself. Given the information and understanding we had, it was certainly understandable that early Man and Woman worshipped the sun, the moon, and the seas or prayed to the stars as much as the clouds for guidance, protection, and strength.

As we grew and became more “scientific” we narrowed this deified Nature down to its details and discerned regular patterns: Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein, along with thousands of others, helped to describe nature as a very distinct and determined package of laws. Because of these laws we were able to develop, in turn, very clear and firm expectations of the world in which we lived. Things operated in an orderly and expectable fashion. And if one just understood the mechanism of the laws of thermodynamics then most of the natural phenomena in which we found ourselves surrounded was about as mysterious as, well, the sun. It burned because of the release of energy due to certain basic chemical and nuclear processes. It rose, it sank, it rose, it sank.  One could even set a clock by it. And the clock, well, it too, had laws. If X, then Y. A is always A, not AB. Etc… As C.S. Lewis put it, we had become “Naturalists” in which “Nature” had just become a word for ‘everything.’

THEN, we grew yet again and discovered the world of quantum mechanics where all the laws we had discovered previously broke down. SO…. Once again the world became a place where nature could be seen as highly unnatural. And ‘everything’ was no longer operating according to an order that was as expectable as we had imagined. The scientific model had been undone by science. Yet it was all science. What was a believer to do?

Especially now that nature itself was not entirely natural (or was it?) we were left with a theological conundrum of a fairly significant magnitude. How are we now to define a miracle? It used to be that a miracle was defined as anything that broke the rules of nature and in so doing showed the hand of the Creator, Who stood eternally above and beyond the laws of nature.

But with modern nature standing in contradiction to itself, with surprises from other dimensions, multi-verses, black holes and time dilation or space folding, is there even room for a miracle? And if so, does it mean that the Creator, if in fact there is One, is both within and without, immanent and transcendent.

So for now, I’d like to take a risk and define a miracle as an occurrence or event or object in which one can see, feel, or experience the presence of a creator, of an existence with purpose and intelligence and meaning, of a numinous divinity. A miracle can only occur when one sees the universe as both the seen and the unseen, when nature itself is a “creature,” one of the created things, not a thing either random or fixed. As C. S. Lewis said, “It is not in her, but in Something far beyond her, that all lines meet and all contrasts are explained.”

In a sense, miraculous events are not “miracles” in that they somehow stand outside of or above nature—because we now know that nothing in the universe does. In the world of super-positioning and quarks and faster-than-light transmission, what is weird is expectable. Instead, we can take “miracles” to mean wondrous. They are arrows pointing to the Thing Behind All Things, to the true unknown, to the end of all scientific enquiry and the beginning of real answers. They are and must never be seen as the answers themselves, of course. That would be the mistake of the sun-worshippers and idolaters. But like a note on a treasure hunt or a colored tag on a tree in a thick woods, they lead us ever up and in.

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