Miracles abounding
by Jamie MacKinnon
Miracles are so-called because they excite wonder. In
unphilosophic minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in
philosophic minds the familiar excites wonder also, and the laws of nature,
if we admit such laws, excite more wonder than the detached events. . . .
The universe, which would explain everything, is the greatest of wonders,
and a perpetual miracle.
- George Santayana, The Idea of
Christ in the Gospels
Miracles in bread, miracles in bed. Miracles at lunchtime and on cometary
nights. Miracles in supermarkets and on county roads. I’ve
found miracles in smell and taste (beer, salmon, lentils, cheese) and in
sound (skates on ice, the eeeee aw aw aw of a seagull). There are miracles
in shadows and reflections, as well as in things directly visible.
Miracles can be found in the many ways and places of life, but too often
we miss them. We don’t look for them. We don’t even
notice them, not even when they call out, and tickle our senses.
To understand this failure, consider the solipsist, a person who holds the
view that the self is “all that exists,” or “all that can be known.” That’s not you or me, of course, but solipsism is a common-enough, if often tacit, foundation for an arid scepicism.
Post-modernism, still prevalent in many corridors of academe, tends to be
sceptical about truth, which is fine, I suppose, but it also tends to be
sceptical also about the knowability of anything beyond the self. Such
scepticism carries costs, one of which is a diminished sense of wonder, which
is the wellspring of faith.
Miracles require faith of the flintiest kind: faith in the existence
of an objective external world, faith in truth and truth-seeking. It
is this kind of faith that makes one susceptible to the world’s grandeur.
Miracles appear to the credulous (which is not to say the gullible), but
belief alone won’t give them birth. Belief forms a ground on
which miracles may be perceived by the wondering senses.
In simple terms, a miracle is an event or state of being the cause of which
is beyond one’s ken, and thus attributed to the divine. Cicero
got this wrong, thinking miracles something without cause: “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” (De divinatione).
It isn’t lack of cause that defines a miracle, but our inability to
understand just how things have come about. As with magic: hidden
cause, astonishing effect.
A miracle has unknown roots, but not so the word. The Latin mirari, to wonder at, is a stem, and this stem has branches that include the words
smile and laugh.
An inconvenient fact for the solipsist is that much of what is real and significant
lies outside one’s experience. An inconvenient fact for the rest
of us is that we see so little of the world that is not, in the final analysis,
a reflection of ourselves. We’re not often interested in coming
to terms with much that is truly strange. But that is precisely what
attentive living requires us to do.
Were we to look, we’d find miracles in fungi and funiculars, in protein
and prime numbers, in snow and silicon chips. And in dancing and burning,
as well as in the stillness of statues and frozen ponds.
At the dawn of a new millennium, does such a call make you smile? Does
it make you laugh?
Anagram for “reclaim,” rhymes with lyrical.
Here’s to many moments of miracles and wonder.
Copyright 2000
Jamie MacKinnon is an Ottawa-based writer.
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