Miracles are natural. When they do not occur something has gone wrong.

— Anonymous

Look around you.  What miracles do you see?

Last week, as the Chilean miners were successfully being brought out of the mine, Roger Ebert blogged on the nature of miracles.  Mr. Ebert was raised a Catholic and was an altar boy in his day.  In his post, What Do You Mean by a Miracle?, he pushes back, HARD, on the idea that events like the rescue of the miners are miracles.  Because he was so well-educated by the nuns, Ebert gives us the Catholic definition of a miracle as an event that stands outside the laws of nature and occurs for one reason – to reveal and demonstrate the glory of God.

Now if you’re Catholic, you know that they use this definition in the literal sense.  One of the problems with this idea, as Arthur C. Clarke points out, is that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  In other words, our ancestors would think that much of what we take for granted is nothing short of a miracle.

With luck, someday, curing people with cancer will be as routine as eliminating measles and mumps and chicken pox.  There was a time when children died of those diseases, which was at least one reason that people had so many children.  When my Book Club read Team of Rivals:  The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, the first thing we all noticed was how many people died.  Everyone who eventually served in Lincoln’s cabinet had lost a spouse or a child or many children to disease and accidents and …  For some reason, prior to reading this book, we hadn’t “gotten” just how “miraculous” it was to survive to adulthood… to survive child birth (mother AND child)… to live to a “ripe old age.”  What we do today as a normal part of living, our grandparents would find downright miraculous.

The Catholic Church is very precise about what they define as a miracle partially because if it’s a miracle that is attributed to an intercessor – Mother Theresa or Pope John Paul II, for example – it is used to “qualify” them for sainthood. (The first and absolute qualification is that the person being considered for sainthood must be dead – otherwise there are some people who would nominate themselves.)

It’s Mostly Attitude

I’d like to suggest that we can look at miracles a little differently – and I think most of us do.  The definition that I would like to suggest for the purpose of this post is an event that defies the odds and helps us appreciate how wondrous life can be.  In other words, a miracle is at least partially determined by our attitude.  Do we look at the event in wonder?  Do we appreciate what happened?

Let me give you an example:  Ellie has a nephew who was diagnosed with colon cancer.  When they finished all the tests and scans, the medical team came up with a count of 50 some tumors throughout his body.  This was not good news!  After several months of an aggressive treatment regimen, he had zero tumors.  Does this feel miraculous to his family?  You betcha!  Did his medical team do a superb job?  Absolutely!  Is it possible that this is the result of learning what works in treating colon cancer as well as his relative youth and fitness as he fought the disease?  Could be.

It doesn’t really matter because his family calls it a miracle and is grateful every day.

When the Chilean miners were first trapped, it was decided that the country of Chile would do whatever it took to bring them out alive – if at all possible.  And then they got to work.  They brought many disciplines together to figure out how to keep the miners alive and how to get them out.  The most miraculous part may be that a large team of people created a plan and executed the plan without allowing egos to get in the way.  Despite hard work over an extended period of time with limited or no time off, the team managed to work together until the last miner had been rescued.

I suggest that this is miraculous.  It defied the odds and made all of us appreciate how we humans can choose to overcome adversity in order to achieve phenomenal results.

Where’s the Miracle?

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here are some of the miracles that I see:

• if we look for it, every day has beauty in it
• throughout the world today are the children who will someday discover the keys to curing cancer
• the human spirit thrives while facing amazing challenges
• we care about our families and our friends and our country and our world
• in each moment, there is something to be grateful for – the dog’s wagging tail, the hawk so close I can almost touch it, the opportunity to choose my response…

Look around you.  What miracles do you see?