Miracles

What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life

Eric Metaxas

• Éditeur: Hodder Faith
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473604780
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Christianity

What are miracles, and why do we believe in them? Is it for comfort, to explain the inexplicable, or do we simply long for a connection with something larger than ourselves? And why do some people dismiss them out of hand, as if they can never happen? What Heaven is for Real did for neardeath experiences, Miracles does for the miraculous-provides undeniably compelling evidence that there's something real to be reckoned with, whatever one has thought of this topic before. It provides a wide range of real stories of the miraculous and will engage the reader in the serious discussion that this fascinating and rich subject deserves. Miracles is in some ways a more personal, anecdotal, and updated version of C. S. Lewis's 1947 book on the subject. Metaxas's Miracles is an exploration and an exhortation to view miracles as not only possible, but as far more widespread than most of us had ever imagined.Eric Metaxas says it is not a question of whether miracles happen-the evidence that they do is overwhelming in this book alone-but rather, what exactly are miracles, why do they happen, and how can we to understand them in our own lives?

PART ONE

THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES

1

BELIEVING IN MIRACLES

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

—C. S. LEWIS

In a 2013 article in The New Yorker about faith and belief, Adam Gopnik wrote the following: “We know that … in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession [sic] with the laws of nature.”

I thought this was an extraordinary statement. To anyone who has experienced the miraculous or who knows people who have experienced it, or who is familiar with the literature of miraculous accounts, it’s difficult to imagine being so confidently dismissive of something that seems at the very least to be entirely possible, and at best to be entirely certain. As someone who lives in Manhattan and who is familiar with the world in which such writers live, I’m afraid I’m not all that surprised. Nonetheless, it’s extraordinary. In the article, Gopnik continues: “We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain.”

Of course, the reason the writer makes these statements has to do with his presupposition that this world is all there is. That way of seeing the world dismisses outright any possibility of anything beyond the material world of time and space. It can be summed up in the words of the late Carl Sagan, who glumly intoned, “The Cosmos is all there is and all there ever will be.” He tried to put some hopeful English on this bleak equation by observing that we were made “of the same material as the stars,” as if being composed of the same elements as distant balls of burning gas could be a poetic consolation to us. Of course the word “stars” carries with it the connotation of magic and wish-fulfillment, but why trade on that when one is saying that there is nothing beyond the material world, and therefore such things as magic and miracles and wishes do not exist and should be abandoned? And if we are not more than aggregates of the elements on the periodic table, why should we want that poetic consolation? Isn’t playing to that desire a contradiction of the main point? Is Dr. Sagan trying to have it both ways and therefore hedging his bet? Or is he simply catering to a television audience by fudging the paralyzing bleakness of what he is saying?

If someone insisting on that strictly materialistic worldview encounters a miracle, or something purporting to be such a thing, he must, by definition, deny that it can be a true miracle. If he insists that the only “evidence” of a miracle he could ever accept must be “naturalistic” evidence, then there obviously can never be any such evidence. It is a tautology, a self-defeating koan, along the lines of “Could God make a rock so big that even he couldn’t move it?” Can one take it seriously?

The second part of this book contains a host of stories that are, if not some kind of evidence for miracles, then what? What does the reader make of them? Are they honestly believed hallucinations? Mere coincidences? Are they lies? Or might they really be miracles?

The stories in this book represent the tiniest fraction of all such stories. For a more academic treatment of the topic of miracles, and for many more accounts than we have here, one should look through Craig S. Keener’s magisterial, authoritative, and extremely thorough two-volume work, Miracles. Anyone wanting a scholarly 1,200-page and definitive rebuttal of Mr. Sagan’s aphorism could start there.

So imagine that there was compelling evidence—some might even say proof—that a supreme being was trying to communicate with humans. Imagine that such evidence was abundant but essentially ignored or dismissed by the news media and by the academic institutions of the Western world. Would that constitute a conspiracy? Some would say that it would. The author of this book would not. But wouldn’t it be scandalous nonetheless? If you’re wondering where that evidence is, this book means to present some of it for the reader’s consideration.

Whether one believes in miracles or the miraculous has mostly to do with the presuppositions one brings to the subject. What presuppositions do we have in asking whether there might be something beyond the natural world? All of us have presuppositions about the nature of things, about whether something can be beyond what we experience with our five senses. Sometimes our presuppositions are the result of our education, but they are just as often determined by, or at least partly the result of, our upbringing and the culture in which we were raised.

When I was growing up, no one I knew talked about miracles much, if at all. The church we went to every Sunday in New York City—in Corona, Queens—was not a place where priests discussed miracles. Miracles were something that happened a long time ago, if they ever had really happened. But if they had happened back then, why they didn’t still happen was not something anyone ever questioned or spoke about either. It was just a sort of sad truth that everyone acknowledged in how they behaved, in how they didn’t talk about the possibilities of miracles. Our not talking about it was part of the larger sadness, but that sadness was just part of the way things were, as far as we all knew.

I remember being in Sunday school class at age five or six and coloring a scene from the Bible. I don’t remember the specifics of it, but I think it pictured a bearded patriarch and an angel. I do remember longing for what people had in those remote, long-ago days: a real connection with God and angels, with the world of miracles and magic. What was keeping us from having that too? I had no idea, but I felt that something inside me was made for that connection with the world beyond this one, for a connection with something more real and more true and more alive than anything I was experiencing or being told about in church. I knew that if I so longed for that world, there must be a reason I longed for it. Why would I long for something that didn’t exist? Where did that longing come from? It was such a deep and innate longing that it seemed to come from a place more real and true and alive than the place I was currently living in, as though my longing was part of my true nature, before it had become broken off, as though it was a vestige of who I really was and would be again someday. It was as though I was a prince exiled from another kingdom and whenever I saw hints of that other kingdom, I hoped to find the way back.

Some people would say that this longing is just a vestige of childhood and nothing else. It is what makes us long for Santa Claus, but then we grow up and move into the world of reality and see those things for what they are. We face the grim reality of being alone in the universe, a universe with no meaning, and we must finally grow up and bravely face that universe and that lack of meaning. We must face the fact that this world of matter—of atoms and molecules and things we could detect with our five senses—is all there is and all there ever was or ever will be. We must come to terms with the idea that our lives only have the meaning that we give them, that our desire for meaning itself is meaningless. But who can bear such thoughts? Unless they are true. And if they are true, what is truth? Can there be such a thing as truth if the world is devoid of meaning?

What is it in us that rebels against this lie of life without meaning—and not only a lie but a monstrous lie that stands against everything we somehow know to be true and good and beautiful? Why do we sometimes feel that we are exiles from someplace glorious? What is this innate feeling that we have shared across cultures, centuries, and continents? We can spend our lives denying it, but our very bones and atoms cry out that this denial of meaning is a lie, that everything in us not only longs for that other world and for meaning, but also needs that other world and needs meaning more than food or water or air. It is what we were made for and we will not rest until we find it again.

Until I was an adult who had found faith and this world of meaning, I knew very little about C. S. Lewis. He was the Oxford don who turned from atheism to belief in God because late one night in 1930 he was walking along a wooded path behind Magdalen College with his friend J. R. R. Tolkien. This was years before Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings and long before Lewis wrote his famous Chronicles of Narnia. They were just young men who had survived the grim horrors of World War I, who had seen the ghastly hell and death of the trenches and the gas warfare, and who were now brilliant young professors at Oxford University. But as they walked and talked along that path, long past midnight, Tolkien had the grounding of a deep belief in something else, and Lewis did not. Tolkien felt that this world was not all there is, but Lewis felt that it was, that the sad horrors of the war they had both survived told them this, that this ugly world was all there is and ever would be and we must face this, although it made us sad to think of it. But surely Lewis—or Jack, as his friends called him—sometimes also wondered why, if it were true, it would make us sad. If it were true, why would something in us want it not to be true? What was that something in us, and how did it get there? What was the meaning of the fact that we should desire something else? What was the meaning of our desire for meaning?

Lewis and Tolkien both knew and loved mythology and the myths of ancient cultures. They knew the old stories of the Greeks and the Romans, and they knew and loved the stories of the Norse gods. In his autobiographical memoir, Surprised by Joy, Lewis recalled how his heart had been pierced when he had read those lines from the Norse Ballads of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “I heard a voice cry, ‘Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!’” Why had this so pierced his heart? Why should this nineteenth-century poem about a fictional character move him so? What was the meaning of that? But after the death of his mother and the pains of life and the horrors of the war he had at least halfway pushed aside such feelings and had come to embrace the sad belief that we could not go back, and all of these stories were just stories. Beautiful stories, but just stories.

But Tolkien had another idea, although for him it was no longer just an idea. He knew that all of these ancient and beautiful stories were echoes of something larger and truer. They were signs that the human race knew of another world that had once existed and would exist again and even now existed in another realm, outside time. He knew the myths of the gods who died in a sacrificial way but who would rise again and live, but he did not know them as unconnected to the world of reality and history. For him they were echoes of a larger reality that had at one time burst through into history, but only once. So that night on the dark wooded path with his friend Jack he asked the question that would change Jack’s life. He asked Jack to consider whether it was possible that one time this myth had coincided with history—whether one time eternity might have broken through into time. Tolkien suggested that it had, that the myth of the god who had died and come to life was an echo of a greater story—of perhaps the greatest story that ever was told—and that one time in history this eternal story had bloomed into reality, had broken through into history and time as a crocus breaks through the snow. And it had changed everything forever and ever, had brought spring into winter, had brought eternity itself into time. Lewis had never considered that. But Tolkien pressed him to consider it and so now he would consider it, and it would haunt him. What if this were true and had happened? And if it had happened, how could we know?

What if all the myths and fairy tales were pointing to something that was not only true but also truer than anything we knew in this world, to a realm that was truer and more real? What if this world of materiality and corporeality were only the “shadowlands,” and what if we were meant for another place that was more real and more true? What if our hearts’ longing for that other place was what led mankind over the years to make a place in our world for myths and religions and fairy tales—and what if the God who had created us and loved us had found a way to break through into our world and to offer us his hand, to say, If you take my hand I can take you back to where you once lived and to where you really belong, because your heart knows that you do? Would you take his hand and let him take you there? Would you believe the miracle of his breaking through into this world? Might you believe in the possibility of miracles just enough to believe that that one miracle had happened, once? Because if you believe in just that one miracle it will open up the world of miracles itself, will lead you back into a world where those miracles themselves point to the larger truth, point to the place where they came from and are signposts to that place, signs for us here to know that there is a place there—and the signs do not just point to that place and tell us that it’s true, but somehow they show us how to get back there, if we can see them for what they are, if we can see the signs and read the signs and dare to follow them.

We must think about these things. We must wonder about them and about our lives and about life in general. It is healthy to wonder. We have a deep need for wondering. “Wonder” is of course the root of the word “wonderful,” so we must wonder generally and we must wonder specifically. What if we could accept that our childhood love of Santa Claus was indeed fantasy but not merely fantasy? What if we could accept that although Santa Claus didn’t really exist as Socrates existed, our desire for him to exist pointed to something that did exist, pointed to something that Socrates himself had longed for? What if those who simply believed in anything were only half-wrong, because their desire to believe pointed to something that was true, not just in the world itself but inside them?

And what if those who knew Santa Claus didn’t really exist were themselves only half-wrong, because their rejection of that kind of sloppy, childish belief pointed to a desire to only believe in what was real, what was really real and not just a myth or a childhood story, a desire to believe in things that are as true as the facts in history books and as real as the atoms and molecules we learned about in science books? What if the half-truth of the desire for something beyond us could meet up with the half-truth of the desire for only what is really real and true, which we can know and see and touch in this world too? What if those two halves could touch and become the one true truth we were both looking for?

This is a book about that.

2

WHAT IS A MIRACLE?

There is no standard definition for miracle to which we may all turn. In fact, what is and isn’t a miracle is extremely subjective. Nonetheless a discussion of what miracles are—and are not—is well worth having.^fn1

Webster’s dictionary defines a miracle as “an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.” More colorfully and memorably, C. S. Lewis once explained that a miracle is something unique that breaks a pattern so expected and established we hardly consider the possibility that it could be broken. “If for thousands of years,” he said, “a woman can become pregnant only by sexual intercourse with a man, then if she were to become pregnant without a man, it would be a miracle.”

Though we probably weren’t expecting ribaldry from Lewis, his observation gets our attention. The skeptic and philosopher David Hume spoke famously against miracles but defined them as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”

We may essentially concur with Hume on this definition, which is probably as close to a standard definition as we will be able to settle on. But I would further simply say that it is when something outside time and space enters time and space, whether just to wink at us or poke at us briefly, or to come in and dwell among us for three decades.

CAN A RATIONAL PERSON BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?

No sooner does the subject of miracles arise than someone must ask whether anyone can today really believe in such things. But consider the following. Science today teaches that the universe came into being via the Big Bang, approximately fourteen billion years ago. According to this generally accepted theory, all matter in the known universe—more than one hundred billion galaxies, each of which contains hundreds of billions of stars and many more planets—exploded out of something smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

But who was behind all of that? Many people would say that God was, although people’s definitions of God and how he created the universe will certainly vary. That a creator was behind it all might be shocking to say in some circles, but for most people on the planet, it is essentially taken for granted. But if we believe that God created the universe out of nothing—ex nihilo, to use the famous Latin phrase—how can we possibly quibble over smaller miracles like turning water into wine or giving sight to a man born blind? Believing that God could create the universe but could not perform any infinitely smaller miracle is illogical. It is very much like saying, “Oh, yes, I certainly believe that Tolstoy could write War and Peace, and did, but I could never believe he’d be able to move a comma in the manuscript. That would be too much.” If God actually created this universe—somehow—can we not believe he would be able to do almost anything else? It seems we would have to.

So if, like most people, we can agree with the first words of the Bible, “In the beginning, God...