The Extraordinary in the Ordinary

Seven Types of Everyday Miracle

Donald A. Crosby

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438464619
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Miracles are usually regarded as an intrusion of a supernatural force upsetting the normal workings and laws of the universe, but if one is attentive to the natural world, one can instead find miracles beneath the surface of everyday existence. This outlook is part of Donald A. Crosby's religious naturalism, which he terms Religion of Nature, a belief system that posits the natural world to be the only world, without any underlying or transcending supernatural being, presence, or power. In The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, Crosby explores seven types of everyday miracles, such as time, language, and love, to show that the miraculous and ordinary are not opposed to each other. Rather, it is when we acknowledge the sacred depths and dimensions of everyday existence that we recognize the miracles that constantly surround us.

1

Two Concepts of Miracle

There are four grand and powerful arguments, which strongly induce us to believe that the Bible must be from God, viz., miracles, prophecies, the goodness of the doctrine, and the moral character of the penmen. All the miracles flow from divine power; all the prophecies from divine understanding; the goodness of the doctrine from divine goodness; and the moral character of the penmen from divine holiness.

—John Wesley1

John Wesley, founder of the Methodist branch of Protestant Christianity, states in the above passage from his writings a commonly assumed concept of the miraculous in its relation to religious faith. According to this concept, miracles provide necessary evidence of the reliability and truth of a religious outlook. The prophecies to which he points as additional essential evidence for the truth of the Christian religion he assumes also to be miraculous in their own way because they point with accurate detail beyond their own times to events distant in the future. For Wesley, miracles are particular acts of God that testify to his awesome presence and power and that give guidance, instruction, and conviction to his human creatures on earth. By his reasoning, any religion without a full store of attested and astounding miraculous occurrences would lack sufficient ground for its acceptance and truth.

In this book, I offer a different concept of miracle from the one Wesley has in mind, and I emphasize the central role this different concept can play in deeply meaningful and amply sustaining religious faith. But before developing this concept in later chapters, I focus for the most part in this chapter on the view of miracles assumed by religious and nonreligious people alike—the view of it to which Wesley confidently alludes—and on the generally unquestioned major place of this view in various religious traditions.

Among numerous striking examples of this notion of what should rightly be regarded as a miracle is an example from the Hebrew Scriptures. A detailed explication of it can set the stage for what follows. The prophet Elijah denounces adherents of the Canaanite religion—with its focus on the god Baal, its presumed fertility god of sky, lightning, and rain—and challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest designed to show that Baal is a pretender to deity and not the true God of heaven and earth. Elijah invites the prophets of Baal to set up an altar to their god. He will do the same. The one who brings down fire from heaven on the altar and sets it ablaze will then be shown by that token to be the true God.

The prophets of Baal slaughter and dress a bullock, placing it on an altar underlain by piles of wood and surrounded by a trench. From morning to noon they cry out to Baal and perform ritual dances around the altar. As is their custom, they cut themselves with swords and lances, causing blood to gush out from their bodies. But there is no response from Baal; no fire swooshes down from the heavens to light the wood under the altar. Elijah begins raucously to mock the prophets of Baal, suggesting that perhaps their god is daydreaming, away on a journey, or asleep, and thus unable to attend to their pleas.

Elijah then builds his own altar with its trench and wood and sets a dressed bullock on it. He even pours copious amounts of water over the sacrifice and wood and allows the water to overflow the trench surrounding the altar. He then prays to the God of Israel, asking God to confirm by a miracle that he is indeed the true God, and that Israelites have grievously erred in worshipping Baal or including this god in their ceremonies because Baal is a false god, neither to be implored, nor feared, nor obeyed.

“Then,” the passage recounting this event in the Book of I Kings reads, “the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt-offering, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.”2 The people in attendance at this event fall on their faces and confess their fervent new commitment to the Israelite God as the one true God. The startling miracle has convinced them and left them with no other recourse. This story in the Hebrew Bible is a vivid example of the conventional concept of miracle in its relation to religious faith. To a significant extent, such faith is said to rest upon and to be confirmed by extraordinary miraculous events believed to be direct acts of divine intervention into ordinary affairs of the world.

In this chapter, I stress in some detail how deeply rooted is the conviction in many religious traditions and among many if not most of their adherents that miracles of the sort recounted in the story about Elijah and the prophets of Baal are essential features of those traditions. If the truth of the miracle accounts in these traditions is not accepted, or so this kind of thinking goes, then the traditions themselves are left without essential support and convincingness. The traditions as a whole are thus said to stand or fall with the truth or falsity of their accounts of miraculous interventions into and consequent astounding interruptions of the normal course of events. I call this idea the conventional view of the nature and role of miracles.

In the succeeding chapter in I Kings, however, there is another story suggesting a different way of thinking about miracles. It is one to which I want to devote my attention in the following chapters of this book. In the present chapter, I continue to offer more discussion and explication of the usual view, but I want at least in passing to refer to the suggestion of a different view conveyed by this second story. In this story, Elijah is fleeing for his life from his Israelite enemies, led by their apostate king, Ahab, and his wife, Jezebel. He feels forsaken and alone and in fear for his life. The Lord comes to Elijah in a cave in which he has hidden himself and asks him what he is doing there. Elijah answers that he has tried to carry out his prophetic mission of calling the children of Israel back to faith in God as their one true Lord, but that they are now pursuing him with the intent to kill him. He is in a mood of dark despair.

God commands Elijah to ascend to a holy mountain and await his instructions. While he remains in the cave, a rushing wind erupts that causes the rocks around him to stir and even to break in pieces. A rumbling earthquake shakes the earth, and an intense fire begins to rage. But the voice of the Lord was in none of these stupendous events. Instead, it is contained in “a still small voice” sounding within Elijah himself.3 Hearing it, he abruptly rises and moves to the entrance of the cave with restored resolution and new confidence in the promise of his prophetic mission.

This still small voice, I suggest, can be construed as the symbol of a contemplative, openhearted spirit that is able to attend to the natural, everyday events of the world—not just those of a highly unusual or unfathomable character—with empowering religious insight, faith, and conviction. Experience of the authentically miraculous can in such cases lie in keen discernment of the profound religious significance of commonplace things and occurrences. Here the familiar is the constant and convincing field of miracle. It becomes such by cultivation of inward ways of experiencing, recognizing, and responding to the ordinary things of the world. This abiding sense of the miraculous does not require astonishingly strange happenings or radical interruptions of the usual courses of events. It is recognition of the extraordinariness of the ordinary when the latter is encountered in a radically receptive and discerning manner.

I argue that religious faith of an entirely adequate and wholly contemporary sort—one that does not presuppose ancient cosmological beliefs or credence given to accounts of miracles implying or resting on those beliefs—can grow out of, be sustained, and be continuously enriched by mindful openness to quotidian miracles, the abundant miracles of everyday life. I provide examples of this kind of miracle in the chapters to come. Profound awareness of the religious significance of such everyday miracles lies at the heart of another type of faith of a wholly naturalistic, this-worldly sort. I give to this faith the name of Religion of Nature and have written about it in earlier books.4

Other types of religious naturalism share in this general outlook as well. And even the more traditional forms of religion can be awakened to new life and meaning when this second sense of miracle is given a more central, if not the central, role. I should note that attention to this second sense of miracle is not entirely lacking in those traditions, even though it is generally accorded secondary importance when compared with the first sense.

But I anticipate and digress, struck for the moment by the contrast between the two very different accounts of Elijah’s experiences, the second of which I interpret as alluding to the central theme of this book. Let me now return in this chapter to further discussion of the widely assumed concept of the character and role of miracles in their relation to religious outlooks and convictions.

Miracles in the Abrahamic Traditions

If we continue to attend to the Hebrew Bible, we can note that its pages are pervaded with accounts of miracles in the conventional sense of that term. These miracles are usually accorded a key importance in the unfolding of the Hebrew Bible’s religious vision. Among numerous examples of this fact are God’s enabling Noah, his family, and creatures of the earth to survive a worldwide flood; Abraham’s experience of cutting a covenant with God and becoming the father of the future Jewish people; Jacob’s wrestling with an angel on one occasion and observing a magnificent stairway to heaven on another; the call of Moses by the God of the Burning Bush; the plague of locusts and the Passover in Egypt; the parting of the sea to allow the Jewish escape from bondage in Egypt and passage toward the Promised Land; and the descent of manna from heaven to feed the Israelites in their long journey through the Sinai peninsula.

Other notable miracles are the arrest of the sun’s course to make more time for a close but finally successful battle with a Canaanite tribe in Palestine; Joshua’s causing the walls of the city of Jericho to collapse by a divinely appointed miracle; and Isaiah’s awesome vision of the Lord high and lifted up in the temple. The miraculous eight-day flame despite insufficient consecrated oil in the temple at the time of the Maccabees that is recounted in extra-biblical Jewish books such as the Mishnah and Talmud is another example of an outstanding miracle in the Jewish tradition. All of these and similar events are seen as critical evidences of the guiding and sustaining actions of God in the history of the Jewish people. The conventional concept of miracle plays a fundamental role in the development of their traditional religious outlook on the world.

In the Christian New Testament, Jesus is said to be born of a virgin as the consequence of her impregnation by the spirit of God; a dove descends from heaven at his baptism, with an announcement of his intimate relation to God the Father; he performs numerous miracles—such as healing the sick, the blind, and infirm; enabling his disciple Peter to walk on the water; feeding the multitudes out of a small supply of food; turning water into wine; and raising Lazarus after he had been dead for four days.

Such miracles are claimed to be essential signs of Jesus’s divine call to his messianic ministry and of the coming into the world of the Kingdom of God as the accompaniment of his ministry. Moreover, there is Jesus’s mysterious transfiguration on the mountain that discloses his true nature to his disciples; his astonishing resurrection from the dead three days after his crucifixion; his subsequent appearances to some of his disciples and followers; and his visible ascent into heaven.

Also recounted in the New Testament are such miracles as the sudden appearance of the risen Christ to Saul on the road to Damascus that transforms him from a persecutor of the Christians to an apostle now named Paul; the Day of Pentecost (fiftieth day after Passover), on which the Holy Spirit descends upon the followers of Christ and they are miraculously enabled to speak in many different languages; and Peter’s instruction by God in a dream to allow Gentiles to become Christians without first requiring them to be circumcised and observe other aspects of the traditional Jewish law.

These and other miracles of what I am calling the conventional sort are central aspects of the then-emerging and crystallizing Christian tradition. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is claimed by Paul in one of the canonical epistles to be the pivotal event of that tradition when he announces that if Christ is not raised from the dead, his own faith and that of all his fellow Christians is entirely in vain. Jesus’s miraculous resurrection provides necessary confirmation, he asserts, of hope for the resurrections of all of them into newness of life after their own deaths.5

If we turn to the religion of Islam, we find that three miracles of the conventional sort also play a basic role in Muslims’ outlook on themselves and the world. Muslims contend that the central confirming miracle of their tradition is the existence of the Holy Qur’an. Muhammad recited the Qur’an day after day in the marketplace, and it was later transcribed into a book. To the Muslim, the book containing these recitations is supremely beautiful and awesomely inspiring.6 And yet it was authored by Muhammad, who is believed to have been unable either to read or to write.7 This would clearly have been impossible, or so the Muslims claim, had the ultimate origin of the Qur’an not originated in Allah as its supernatural source and inspiration. This is indeed what the Qur’an and revered Islamic traditions proclaim in their account of how Muhammad was instructed to commit to memory and publicly recite what an angel of Allah transmitted to him over successive nights in a dark cave.8

A second major miraculous occurrence is briefly recounted in the Qur’an but greatly amplified in subsequent accounts. This is Muhammad’s nighttime ascent into heaven, where he communes with renowned Jewish and Christian prophets and with Allah Himself.9 This journey is for Muslims crucial evidence of Muhammad’s divine call to be the seal of the prophets and to present Allah’s consummatory revelation to humankind. It is a miracle of the conventional sort as I have described it—an extraordinary breakthrough into the ordinary course of events.

The third miracle held to be of central importance to dedicated Muslims and the eschatological confirmation of the truth of their faith is the promise of their being raised from the dead on the other side of this life and being brought into a lush garden with flowing water springs and many other highly desirable features, there to abide forever.10 As with Paul’s proclamation to Christians in the New Testament, the hope of miraculous resurrection into everlasting life in a glorious new realm presided over by Allah is a central aspect of the Islamic religious outlook.

Muhammad was not a routine miracle worker like Moses or Jesus. But the Qur’an endorses many of the miracles recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. It also affirms the Gospel accounts of the miraculous birth of John the Baptist to a barren mother and to a father well advanced in age, and of Jesus’s birth by the Virgin Mary.11 It does not, however, accept the idea of Jesus as God in human flesh. The Christian acclamations of the miracle of the Incarnation and of the doctrine of the Trinity are anathema to Muslims and rejected as flagrantly idolatrous. Jesus for Islam is a great prophet but only a human being. The same is true for them of Muhammad, the greatest of Allah’s prophets.

Thus, miracles of the conventional kind figure importantly in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are relied upon as providing essential support for the claims to truth of those three traditions. In the next section, I reflect briefly on the role of miracles of this kind in two prominent religions that developed to the east of Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula: Hinduism and Buddhism.

Miracles in Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism

Miracles in the conventional sense of the term are associated for the most part in Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism with beings that fall under the class of what are called in Sanskrit avatars. Avatars are manifestations of supernatural beings in earthly form...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Two Concepts of Miracle
• Chapter 2 Passage of Time
• Chapter 3 History of Histories
• Chapter 4 Individual Consciousness
• Chapter 5 Spoken and Written Language
• Chapter 6 Immensity of the World
• Chapter 7 Power of Imagination
• Chapter 8 Ideal of Love
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover