A letter on so-called “miracles”

To my beloved, as you search for a sign from above,

There is nothing coming. Call me a pessimist, call me a nihilist, but don’t call me wrong because you know I’m right. Granted, you’ll never admit to this — you ‘God-fearing’ folk are quite stubborn in your insistence that miracles of the supernatural kind do, in fact, happen; that God, whenever he feels so inclined, reaches out his omnipotent hand and manipulates the laws of the physical universe, so as to assert his divine authority and demonstrate his abundant benevolence. 

But let me ask you this, my beloved? Do you truly want a sign? Do you truly wish to bear witness to God in all of his unfathomable glory? I suspect that was God standing right in front of you, reaching out his hand, beckoning you to follow, you would instead close your eyes, flee in horror and convince yourself that it was all merely a bad dream — a psychotic break from reality.

To prove my point, let’s consider a lesser case of divine revelation: the transformation of the Eucharist into human flesh. Imagine you were witness to such a miracle — would you truly want to believe it? Would you truly want to believe that this brittle, unremarkable wafer inexplicably became live tissue from a human heart — the ‘literal’ body of Christ, irrefutable proof of the God that you, I suspect, don’t actually believe in? 

No, it seems apparent that you, rather than falling on your knees in utter reverence to this God who just demonstrated to you, beyond reasonable doubt, the infinitude of his being, would instead do everything in your power to disprove what you had just seen. You would call the priest who oversaw the miracle a liar; you would accuse the church of fraud; you would search for a scientific explanation to rectify the impossibility of the miracle at hand. 

And after all this, I suspect that you, my beloved, would go on saying your daily prayers, attending Sunday mass, and living amongst the starving and the sick — aren’t you a good person (you are, truly)! But all the while, you would refuse to accept that this God in whom you profess to believe is real — real in the sense that he can bring about the inconceivable, the supernatural, by even the slightest wave of his hand. No, you don’t want to believe in the fullness of God because the God you believe in is an illusion — a hopeful yet fictitious story that gives you reason to believe in life, despite the fact that, deep down, you and I and everyone else knows that all of this — this toil, these fleeting happy thoughts, the beauty of the setting sun, are f**king pointless. 

Or maybe we want to believe this because however tragic a meaningless universe would be, the alternative is far, far more terrifying. But entertain this thought for a moment, if you’d be so kind, my darling because I suspect God’s glory may be far more evident than we think it:

Didn’t we, on the day of our births — the first time our eyelids fluttered open — bear witness to the most improbable of all miracles? And moreover, do we not bear witness to the very same miracle each and every time we open our eyes? What is so probable about a bright blue sky streaked with clouds or a grey sky that brings about rain? And what is so likely about a cherry tree flowering in spring or a forgettable chestnut tree shedding its foliage with the encroachment of winter? But these examples are much too poetic, and really, they miss the point.

Consider this: what is so banal about a hug shared between two friends? Is this manifestation of love really a mere given — an everyday, unremarkable encounter? And is it not a miracle, is it not the most supernatural of all occurrences, that you get to witness this act of love? I fear, my beloved, that you are missing the forest for the trees.

So no, you will not get your supernatural sign from above, but not because that sign isn’t coming. You won’t get your sign because it’s already here. It’s been right in front of you this entire time — everywhere you’ve looked, you’ve borne witness to it — and yet you’ve been too foolish to notice. You’ve spent your days seeking out the extraordinary when, all along, the real miracle was to be found in that which appears so crushingly ordinary, yet in fact, is anything but. Darling, I beg you, hear these words spoken by Belvidere, the protagonist of Séamus Atherton’s seminal novel, “Divine Thinness,” and take them to heart:

“After a while, I closed my eyes, and the winds began to sweep over me; they lifted me from that rocky beach, carrying me to a place bounded neither by space nor by time. Then, I sensed a great light above me, below me, all around me; I thought to myself that, if I were to open my eyes, I would surely behold the face of God …

… so I kept my eyes closed, because it is better if one cannot see.”

With trickery and deception,

T.W.