December 24, 2007
Greetings from a believer,
If you look through a prism you see an indistinct world on
the other side. Pieces and slices,
flashes of color, then only white. But
wait; go back, what was that?
It is our nature to try to explain things. Humans are curious, inquisitive, we look for
solutions and reasons and rationale and purpose. We want to understand, and sometimes I think
we over-steer right past what we are seeking.
Humans, particularly adults, have little tolerance for
miracles. Miracles are too easy to
explain away. They are too easy for
science to debunk. We are
know-it-alls. We, the same specie who
was absolutely positive about the earth being flat, have figured out most of
the tough questions, and anything that’s left is just a matter of time and good
hypothesis. Bring me a miracle and I’ll
show you the man behind the curtain.
Poets point to the miracle of the dragonfly and aeronautical
engineering rushes in to elucidate.
Children are agape at a snowflake and parents explain how the dendrites
of an ice crystal form, followed by a mathematical hypothesis that no two could
be alike.
Miracles have always been some event that someone else
experienced. Someone is healed, or saved
from certain death, or sees a dead relative.
It’s mythology. It’s
superstitions. It’s collective
hallucination. It’s something that only
happened thousands of years ago when science wasn’t around to stop it. Any miracles today would likely land on the
front page of the National Enquirer.
Maybe they are.
There are scholars who are experts on miracles, both proving
them and discrediting them. I am not in
that company. I am one of those ordinary
humans who is mystified by the incredible miracles around us, and still
disbelieves the blind who can now see, the lame who can now walk. I still have doubts layered with certainty
layered with doubts.
Children are, thankfully, not burdened with this
cynicism. They are open to miracles, see
them, expect them. There are all kinds
of things I wish I could protect my kids from, including the loss of innocence,
whatever clicks in them that pushes miracles into the realm of fantasy. Not to say I don’t want them to be
discriminating, thinking adults, but somewhere as we mature, as we become
wiser, we begin to see less of the amazing around us, and more of the function.
It is as if we are looking through a glass prism. We tilt the glass, turn it in our hand, try
to get a clear look through it, squinting at vague shapes, upside down forms,
distorted objects. Then, every once in
a while we get a clear view of the world on the other side, crystal clear, a
true representation of what is right before our eyes.
The miracles in our life are there in front of us, obscured
only by our own unfocused eyes. If we
look carefully, wait for the moment for them to come into our line of vision,
we will see what has been put there for us.
When light comes through a prism it can reveal the colors
hidden there. The light that comes into
our world, with all of the splendor and awe that it brings to us, has hidden in
it a lining of spectacular beauty. It’s
just the beginning of what might be revealed to us, if we look carefully, with
an eye on believing, not debunking.
Albert Einstein once said: “There are only two ways to live
your life. One is as though nothing is a
miracle. The other as though everything
is a miracle.”
I have prayed for miracles and none came. At least not the ones I prayed for. That has bored holes of doubt in me, where my
faith has leaked out. Except I remember
people waiting hundreds of years for a miracle to appear, and when it did, many
didn’t recognize Him.
The word ‘miracle’ from the Latin ‘miraculum’ means
‘something wonderful’. Perhaps in our
rush to explain ‘something wonderful’ in words scientists can understand, we
have raised the bar of miracles until we cannot see them anymore. Someone once said, “If one had never seen a
flower, even a dandelion would seem miraculous.”
There are miracles and there are miracles. In the morning we’ll celebrate the light that
comes into our world, the brilliant, revealing, cleansing light, and the
miracle within the miracle, the immeasurable, incomprehensible spectrum of
color that is our God. We only need to
look long enough, have faith enough for the miracle to reach us.
Merry Christmas.
Hope this finds you with your eyes wide open,
David
Copyright © 2007 David Smith
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