TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/123091/1230611.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.9 KB | 209 lines

                                                                                RELIGION, Page 68

COVER STORIES

How to Believe in Miracles


Some of them, like reported apparitions of the Virgin, should be
approached warily. But even more amazing miracles can be found
and embraced every day.

By LANCE MORROW -- Reported by D. Blake Hallanan/San Francisco


    People thought the sun was spinning in the sky. Some of
them stared directly into the blazing light. They hoped to see
the Virgin Mary there. A local housewife named Theresa Lopez
had had visions of Mary and promised an apparition. Six
thousand of the hopeful stared up at heaven near Lookout
Mountain. T shirts (MOTHER CABRINI SHRINE and FEAST OF THE
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION) sold for $20 each. The bottles of HOLY
WATER, MEANS OF SPIRITUAL HEALTH were free.

    Theresa Lopez said she saw the Virgin "wearing a gold gown
. . . surrounded by pink, sparkling lights." Everyone else saw
blue sky and stabbing sunlight. When the day was over, a woman
named Kathy left the Mother Cabrini Shrine near Denver
disillusioned. She had brought her two-year-old son, who is
mentally and physically disabled, because she thought the Virgin
would help him.

    Now yellow and green dots danced before her eyes. A doctor
told her that when she stared at the sun, she burned both her
retinas and damaged the central line of her vision. "I go up
there to pray with one disabled member of my family and come
home with two," she said bitterly. "I'm done praying. In a way,
I'm angry with God."

    Denver's Archbishop J. Francis Stafford advised Catholics
to stop going to the shrine in the hope of visions. He warned
about unreliable "private revelations" and appointed a committee
to examine the Lopez case.

    The realm of the miraculous sometimes lies just across the
border from the fanatical or the tacky. Miracles may turn into
roadside tourist traps, Fellini scenes. A revelation may go
commercial and look like a snake farm beside the highway in
North Florida. The transcendent moment falls from grace and
spoils on the ground like rotten fruit. So the territory of the
miraculous must be approached carefully, by stages, passing from
the gaudiest, shabbiest outer display toward what may,
occasionally, turn out to be a deeper truth.

    Even the most accomplished soul may be ambivalent about
miracles. The Buddha disapproved of them. Once, by the bank of
a river, he met an ascetic who claimed that after practicing
austerity for 25 years, he was at last able to cross the river
by walking on the water. The Buddha said he was sorry that the
man had wasted so much time and effort: the ferryboat would take
him across for one penny.

    Still, the Buddha understood the theatrical possibilities.
In his native city of Kapilavastu, the Buddha rose in the air,
emitted flames and streams of water from his body, and walked in
the sky. In order to convince his relatives of his spiritual
powers, he cut his body into pieces, let his head and limbs fall
to the ground, and then joined them all together again before
the astonished audience.

    A miracle is a wonder, a beam of supernatural power
injected into history. Up There descends Down Here for an
instant. The world connects to a mystery -- a happening that
cannot be explained in the terms of ordinary life.

    Is the miracle an external event occurring in the real,
objective world? Or is it a sort of hallucination, an event of
the imagination? During the '60s, that hallucinatory decade, the
writer Carlos Castaneda sought illumination with his teacher Don
Juan through the use of peyote, Jimson-weed and mushroom dust.
Drug miracles: Castaneda found himself having conversations with
a bilingual coyote and looking at a 100-ft.-tall gnat with
spiky, tufted hair and drooling jaws.

    The noblest miracles, arising not from drugs but from
creativity, are events of the imagination. Yet skeptics dismiss
miracles as being "merely" imaginary. Cicero argued doggedly,
"Nothing happens without a cause, and nothing happens unless it
can happen. When that which can happen does in fact happen, it
cannot be considered a miracle. Hence, there are no miracles."

    Elie Wiesel quotes a Hasidic rabbi's prayer, "I have but
one request; may I never use my reason against truth." Wiesel's
grandfather believed "An objective Hasid is not a Hasid." The
value of miracles hinges upon these distinctions. The
subjective and objective flow into one another until the
distinction between the two is meaningless, just as the
distinction between God and human vanishes. Reason has its
mechanical uses in an ordinary world but is counterproductive
in the higher realms that miracles inhabit. So says the
believer's mystic line.

    The miraculous moves with a dreamy, dangerous ease across
the boundaries of spiritual illumination, insanity and fiction.
Miracles are like wonders of the storyteller's invention, full
of surprise. They belong somehow to an oral tradition. They form
pictures in the mind: living hieroglyphs, dramas of sanctity.
This is work connected to the power of the supernatural,
implicated with the business of creation.

    Christ performed at least 35 miracles -- walking on water,
healing the sick, multiplying the loaves and fishes, turning
water into wine, raising the dead. Why? Did he perform them to
establish his identity, to persuade the people of his power? To
solidify their faith? To show dramatically that God took such
an interest in his creation? The Incarnation, as C.S. Lewis
wrote, was the greatest of Christian miracles, the profound
transaction in which the Word became flesh. God, the principle
of eternity, becomes one with the human, earthly and mortal. The
birth sanctified all human birth.

    What is the use of traditional miracles now? Perhaps, as
Elie Wiesel once suggested, people need reassurance that
miracles are still possible, even for them: the dreariest fate
may be reversed. The miracle is antidote to the despair that
arises from sheer inevitability. The disintegration of Soviet
communism, said to have been foretold at Fatima, has had a
surreal quality of the miraculous reversal about it.

    The traditional religious miracle -- an apparition of the
Virgin, say -- occupies a problematic place in a technological
world. Such a vision may not be the strongest card that divinity
could play in the late 20th century, when the globe is
overstimulated by its extravagant secular wonders.

    Is it a miracle when the heart of a man newly dead is
lifted from his chest and installed in another man who is dying
-- whereupon the heart comes throbbing to life in the chest of
the second man, and he walks away and lives on for years? The
event is repeated every day on medical assembly lines around the
world. What is surgical plumbing today would have been a
biblical masterpiece of wonder. Even commonplace achievements of
technology, like telephones, fax machines, television,
communications satellites and computers, suffuse the earth with
a sort of preternatural glow. The people of the industrialized
world have become consumers of secularized miracles -- and the
people of the Third World yearn for such products with a kind
of religious ardor. Show a developing Polaroid picture to a man
in a remote forest of Africa or South America. The developing
image (his own, perhaps) seems to him more astonishing and
supernatural than the Shroud of Turin.

    Whose work are such miracles? Are they wonders divine or
human? Traditional miracles -- for example, cures at Lourdes --
have a certain quaintness about them, a period quality. Unlike
secular technological wonders, traditional religious miracles
do not have to top themselves from one year to the next. Secular
miracles become obsolete: the first silent movies were
miraculous. Then the talkies were miraculous. Then television.
When miracles can be superseded by new miracles, they have
descended from the realm of the absolute. Miracles become
mortal.

    Can miracles be programmed onto microchips and still
belong to the category of the miraculous? Can the wonder of the
other world, the hypothetical perfection, be dreamed up,
designed and turned into products? A perfect digital
reproduction of the Ninth Symphony owes its miraculousness not
to the manufacturer of the sound system but to the divinity in
Beethoven's music.

    The supernatural has taken a thousand routes into the
ordinary world. Sometimes the deed is the miracle. A candidate
to become a Manchu shaman might put on a miraculous performance
by cutting nine holes in the ice in winter -- then diving into
the first hole, emerging from the second hole, diving into the
third and so on. Survival yields a shaman.

    It is human nature to be awed by the electrical displays
of God the Father. The deeper miracles are less garish. In any
case, it is odd to look for healings, apparitions and other
performance miracles when every bird's feather and fish's scale
proclaims divinity. The miracle is creation itself.

    Miracles take the form of lives. Abraham Lincoln was a
miracle. Divinity poured almost spontaneously out of Mozart.
Surely when it is time for the Catholic Church to canonize
Mother Teresa, it will seem redundant for a panel of theologians
in Rome to ask for proof of miracles she performed. She herself
is the miracle.

    A miracle makes an opening in the wall that separates this
world and another. Divinity, another dimension, may flow through
the aperture. A darker force could pass through the aperture as
well. Or the whole thing may be only a magic trick.

    The gaudier miracles are entertaining. A few of them may
be authentic by Vatican standards. But a miracle without
purpose is mostly a trick. Far from tourist trap and snake farm,
there is the Ur-miracle from which all miracles derive. It is
useful, simple, transforming and persuasive. It cannot be faked.
It is love.