I served as a lead counselor at a history camp for an organization called Classical Conversations last summer. I got to know one particular little girl who I couldn’t really decide if she was odd, troublesome, nerdy, sweet, or absolutely lovable. Maybe she was all those things. Anyway, one day, during snack time, she approached me.
“Do you believe in miracles?” she asked.
“Of course,” I answered.
“Can I tell you something, and will you believe me and not laugh at me?”
I wasn’t quite sure what I was in for, but, hoping it wasn’t anything ridiculous, I said “Sure. You can trust me.”
“What if I told you that we found diamonds in our house?”
“I don’t know. Did you find diamonds in your house?”
She nodded, wide-eyed.
“Where do you think they came from?” I asked.
“They came from heaven!” she exclaimed. “Do you believe they came from heaven?”
In the split second between the question and reply, a number of thoughts passed through my head. Yes, I believed the little girl’s family had really found diamonds in their house. Also, I got the feeling that she probably wasn’t supposed to be telling me. Was I going to be the patronizing sort of grown-up who entertained her child’s notion of miracles with a big, condescending smile on my face, like it was belief in Santa Claus? Or was I going to be the dream-destroying realist who told her that they were probably just left behind by the previous owners of the house? I couldn’t bring myself to do either. So I told her:
“I think a lot of things come from heaven. Like friends.”
“And diamonds,” the girl returned, nodding eagerly.
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
When people ask me questions like this, I’m almost never satisfied with my answers. But I think this was one answer I don’t need to dream of doing over. It is the same answer I would have given a full grown adult. The question, admittedly, comes up in a different form: Is something only a miracle if it is odd, extraordinary, or completely out of the everyday experience? If it rains water, we call it nature; if it rained frogs or pumpkin pie, we would call it a miracle. But if you ask me, I don’t think the clouds need to precipitate pumpkin pie to be miraculous. A lot of things come from heaven—like friends. And rain. And diamonds.
You may think this is an easy argument to make if all I mean by a miracle is merely a descriptive adjective for the nice things in life. Last week, I encouraged you to think of the poetic sentiment “soul of the river” in the literal sense—that is, as if rivers really had souls. Before that, we talked about the lost sense of wonder—how our culture has lost its’ fascination for the quiet beauty of ordinary things. Today, I want to take that a step further. What ifwe treated these seemingly ordinary events as if they were literally supernatural events from heaven? Would this serve as an antidote to heal our decrepit loss of wonder?
Perhaps, but it would not do any good in the long run if the claim wasn’t true. No doubt the little girl in my story had a sense of Wonder, but she only acquired it by believing in something that couldn’t have happened: that an angel came in the night and tucked some diamonds under the cushions. Pretending that natural scientific laws are miraculous supernatural interferences may make us happier idiots, but we haven’t changed the laws of nature, only the state of our minds. In other words, the antidote is a painkiller, not the cure. It is like taking a hallucinatory drug that makes us see everything as a beautiful dream when really all we are seeing is the musty old carpet in the basement and the glazed look of our addled friends. I don’t want anyone to regain their wonder in that way. But is that really the true state of the world?
One thing scientists all agree on is that Nature is always moving. Air is moving, water is moving, animals are moving, and even the things that don’t appear to be moving at all (like the coffee cup on my desk) are really swarming with microscopic neutrons and electrons, bouncing off each other and promenading together in their electromagnetic orbits. Nothing you have ever seen or ever will see has ever really “stood still.” Everything is being caused by something else, or so I recall from my high-school studies on Newton’s laws of motion. (Note: I am not speaking as a scientist. I know next to nothing about science. Any real scientist is free to correct me if I get the facts wrong.)
When you throw a pebble in a lake, the laws of Nature dictate that a ripple will follow. But it was not the laws of Nature that caused the ripple, it was the pebble. Furthermore, the stone did not throw itself, you threw it. In a word, the ripple was caused by you. Now a raindrop, just like a pebble, will cause a ripple in the lake. But unlike the pebble, the raindrop was not caused by you. It was caused by the vaporization of gasses in the sky, which was caused by evaporated water. But hey, you know the water cycle, I don’t need to reiterate your seventh-grade science teacher. But here’s the catch: you can’t say the water cycle was caused by itself—that is, you can’t say the events of evaporation and precipitation are mutually causing each other to happen. If you can explain how that is possible, you have invented the Perpetual Motion machine, and our whole energy crisis would be over. It was caused by a whole separate platform of foreign events, such as heat and wind and gravity and a million other things I don’t know about. And what was causing those things? Now my brain is getting dizzy.
No matter how far you trace it back, the only thing my imagination provides for the ultimate initiator of the causal chain must be something like a person throwing a pebble in a lake. That is why the Greek gods of nature actually seem to me a much more likely hypothesis than the modern world will have us believe. Science can answer a lot of questions, but it leaves us wanting. Our imagination demands that we have persons, or, perhaps, a Person (what Aristotle called the “unmoved mover") who orchestrates the cycles of Nature. So, to answer our little girl’s question, yes. Her diamonds did come from heaven. And she came from heaven too. So did you. So does everything else.
I realize that both to the religious and the non-religious alike, I am probably not saying anything new. In fact, everything I have said has been said much better in C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles. I am mostly compelled to write this because even people in my community who hold religious views have come to view “faith” as a vapory, abstract concept, quite disconnected from everyday life. But faith becomes all the more immediate when you step out into that nippy October air and realize that the wind in your hair is not just a byproduct of uneven heating on the Earth’s surface, but a whispering from the breath of God Himself. Even believers have a hard time coming to terms with this. How can you call a little breeze in your face an encounter with God? Well, I would hardly call it a direct encounter—that would be truly terrible. It is more like hearing the music from a festival a long way off, the echoes of a campfire song deep in the forest. The festival may be far out of reach…you may never reach it at all. But as long as you are following the sound, I believe Wonder has been restored to its’ rightful place on the throne.
