Elaine Jakes always pronounced the word miracle “myuracle.” I’ve rarely heard another person do so, and I honestly can’t recall whether Lizzie Ann Jones Evans (Elaine’s grandmother and my great-grandmother) or Blanche Evans Jakes said “myuracle.” It has been too many years since Lizzie died (1968) and, I suppose, too many since Blanche passed away in 1982. But my mother’s pronunciation rings in my ears just as Lizzie Ann’s blessing does.
Lizzie Ann’s blessing was as simple one: “God,” she said to me when I was but five years old, “has chosen you for a very special purpose in this life.” I think that, though a five-year old may not remember how that person pronounced miracle, that same five-year old could hardly fail to remember, throughout his life, the blessing of his great grandmother only four years before her passing at the age of 94.
I suppose that blessing is, for me, writing, and that’s why I write. And part of why I write is because I wish simply to chronicle everyday miracles (or should I say myuracles?), for it was not only my mother’s pronunciation of the word miracle that was striking but rather it was her inclination to see miracles in everyday events. Someone, perhaps a proper theologian, might be annoyed by the practice of seeing miracles in practically everything, for he or she might argue that it debases the value of the term miracle. A miracle, someone might say, really should be a spectacular event, something, well, miraculous, like a child being rescued from a burning building, someone recovering improbably from a disease or other condition, or someone whose life situation changed so dramatically that no other word than miracle will do. While I don’t disagree that all those things are miraculous, I think, like my mother, that day-to-day miracles can be just as telling, maybe even more so.
Telling? Telling of what? That is the question for any miracle, big or small: what story is it telling? And, all this came up at a pub the other evening, just briefly, as I sat there having a beer with a famous archaeologist (who will remain nameless) about his improbable career and meteoric rise in the profession and just the many strange—in fact, were I to tell his whole story, surpassing strange—things that had to have happened for him to be the outstanding professor (for his command of the ancient languages outstrips nearly any other archaeologist that I’ve ever met) and stellar field archaeologist that he is. And while any one of those things could be fobbed off as mere coincidence, the sum of them, well, it amasses to a ponderance of circumstantial evidence of a miracle.
And that is what this blog is about: it’s the small “myuracles” that really add up that are, in many ways, far more spectacular than the big ones. Of course, we all rejoice when trapped miners are rescued from deep in the bowels of the earth. Or when a child falls three stories and survives, or when our friend recovers from an aggressive form of cancer. And we should, for those miracles are wonderful things, and I always feel sorry for the atheist who says to me, “If I only saw a miracle first hand, I’d believe there is a God” and then often adds, “but I haven’t seen one, and I never will.”
My response isn’t, “Well, I have, many times.” I think that, but I don’t say it. Rather, I say, “Have you ever seen a baby nestled in its mother’s arms? If that’s not a myuralce” (and here I deliberately mispronounce the word in honor of Elaine), “I simply don’t know what is.”
When I was a student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, I had a course entitled “Approaches to History.” In it, we considered various ways of writing and reconstructing history. It reflected the first beginnings of what is now commonly referred to as revisionist history, which means history interpreted through the lens of a particular sociological or political agenda. It sounds innocent enough, and at some level it is innocent. On the positive side, such an understanding of history means that we can’t just take for granted what we have inherited in a history book that purports to be unbiased. To enlarge on that, it means that there is no “unbiased” history. Everyone, wittingly or not, has a point of view that is influenced by his or her surroundings, his or her values or lack thereof, and when one interprets or reconstructs or writes history it will be, inevitably, interpreted or written through the aforementioned lens.
Take Christianity, for example. The Christian scriptures were written, presumably, by Christians who no doubt would have had a bias as to how to interpret the history of Christmas and Easter. The minor miracles surrounding Christmas are less spectacular than that of Easter, so I leave those aside. But Easter: now there’s a dilemma. If the Christians are the ones in charge of relating the history of the empty tomb, couldn’t they be revising their interpretation of the events to suit their own political agenda? In the gospels (and non-canonical concomitant Christian literature), the early Christians all claimed that the tomb was empty. A modern historian, operating from the assumption that miracles don’t “really” happen, could revise that account: “Well, the Christians were obviously biased and were unable to see clearly what happened, so they pretended he was raised from the dead. Or maybe they even hid the body and lied about the resurrection.” And thus this historian has revised the history to what is “more likely” or at least more logical. But the lens of that historian has its own bias: it is based on the notion of miracles not happening.
But what if those miracles did happen? If one were to entertain that possibility for even a moment, one would have to go back and reconsider, yet again, the big miracle of Easter and, yes, even the minor miracles surrounding Christmas. And one would have to look at one’s own life and recognize those times when something happened that seemed miraculous. And so forth. That process may just lead that person upwards out of despair and directly to the wider, redemptive implication of Easter, the foot of the cross. But that is the material of another blog.
Even encounters with boorish folks, say the high-brow types, who want to demythologize (their term, not mine) everything, are actually quite amusing. I was at a cocktail party recently chatting with just such a person, who was schooling me on how there is nothing miraculous in this material universe, nor can there ever be, as the universe is naturally material. I did not point out to him the circularity of his argument, nor did I question whether his use of the word “naturally” was meant to be a pun. It didn’t seem likely that it was, as he did not seem capable of puns. His words were rather dour, cold and in any case far too sober, even though he was paradoxically well-along on his second martini. Still, this “fact” was at the forefront of his if not small, at least pretty well closed mind.
