How To Believe in Miracles

By LANCE MORROW

People thought the sun was spinning in the sky. Some of them stared directly into the blazing light. They hoped to see the Virgin Mary there. A local housewife named Theresa Lopez had had visions of Mary and promised an apparition. Six thousand of the hopeful stared up at heaven near Lookout Mountain. T shirts (MOTHER CABRINI SHRINE and FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION) sold for $20 each. The bottles of HOLY WATER, MEANS OF SPIRITUAL HEALTH were free.

Theresa Lopez said she saw the Virgin "wearing a gold gown . . . surrounded by pink, sparkling lights." Everyone else saw blue sky and stabbing sunlight. When the day was over, a woman named Kathy left the Mother Cabrini Shrine near Denver disillusioned. She had brought her two-year-old son, who is mentally and physically disabled, because she thought the Virgin would help him.

Now yellow and green dots danced before her eyes. A doctor told her that when she stared at the sun, she burned both her retinas and damaged the central line of her vision. "I go up there to pray with one disabled member of my family and come home with two," she said bitterly. "I'm done praying. In a way, I'm angry with God."

Denver's Archbishop J. Francis Stafford advised Catholics to stop going to the shrine in the hope of visions. He warned about unreliable "private revelations" and appointed a committee to examine the Lopez case.

The realm of the miraculous sometimes lies just across the border from the fanatical or the tacky. Miracles may turn into roadside tourist traps, Fellini scenes. A revelation may go commercial and look like a snake farm beside the highway in North Florida. The transcendent moment falls from grace and spoils on the ground like rotten fruit. So the territory of the miraculous must be approached carefully, by stages, passing from the gaudiest, shabbiest outer display toward what may, occasionally, turn out to be a deeper truth.

Even the most accomplished soul may be ambivalent about miracles. The Buddha disapproved of them. Once, by the bank of a river, he met an ascetic who claimed that after practicing austerity for 25 years, he was at last able to cross the river by walking on the water. The Buddha said he was sorry that the man had wasted so much time and effort: the ferryboat would take him across for one penny.

Still, the Buddha understood the theatrical possibilities. In his native city of Kapilavastu, the Buddha rose in the air, emitted flames and streams of water from his body, and walked in the sky. In order to convince his relatives of his spiritual powers, he cut his body into pieces, let his head and limbs fall to the ground, and then joined them all together again before the astonished audience.

A miracle is a wonder, a beam of supernatural power injected into history. Up There descends Down Here for an instant. The world connects to a mystery -- a happening that cannot be explained in the terms of ordinary life.

Is the miracle an external event occurring in the real, objective world? Or is it a sort of hallucination, an event of the imagination? During the '60s, that hallucinatory decade, the writer Carlos Castaneda sought illumination with his teacher Don Juan through the use of peyote, Jimson-weed and mushroom dust. Drug miracles: Castaneda found himself having conversations with a bilingual coyote and looking at a 100-ft.-tall gnat with spiky, tufted hair and drooling jaws.

The noblest miracles, arising not from drugs but from creativity, are events of the imagination. Yet skeptics dismiss miracles as being "merely" imaginary. Cicero argued doggedly, "Nothing happens without a cause, and nothing happens unless it can happen. When that which can happen does in fact happen, it cannot be considered a miracle. Hence, there are no miracles."

Elie Wiesel quotes a Hasidic rabbi's prayer, "I have but one request; may I never use my reason against truth." Wiesel's grandfather believed "An objective Hasid is not a Hasid." The value of miracles hinges upon these distinctions. The subjective and objective flow into one another until the + distinction between the two is meaningless, just as the distinction between God and human vanishes. Reason has its mechanical uses in an ordinary world but is counterproductive in the higher realms that miracles inhabit. So says the believer's mystic line.

The miraculous moves with a dreamy, dangerous ease across the boundaries of spiritual illumination, insanity and fiction. Miracles are like wonders of the storyteller's invention, full of surprise. They belong somehow to an oral tradition. They form pictures in the mind: living hieroglyphs, dramas of sanctity. This is work connected to the power of the supernatural, implicated with the business of creation.

Christ performed at least 35 miracles -- walking on water, healing the sick, multiplying the loaves and fishes, turning water into wine, raising the dead. Why? Did he perform them to establish his identity, to persuade the people of his power? To solidify their faith? To show dramatically that God took such an interest in his creation? The Incarnation, as C.S. Lewis wrote, was the greatest of Christian miracles, the profound transaction in which the Word became flesh. God, the principle of eternity, becomes one with the human, earthly and mortal. The birth sanctified all human birth.

What is the use of traditional miracles now? Perhaps, as Elie Wiesel once suggested, people need reassurance that miracles are still possible, even for them: the dreariest fate may be reversed. The miracle is antidote to the despair that arises from sheer inevitability. The disintegration of Soviet communism, said to have been foretold at Fatima, has had a surreal quality of the miraculous reversal about it.

The traditional religious miracle -- an apparition of the Virgin, say -- occupies a problematic place in a technological world. Such a vision may not be the strongest card that divinity could play in the late 20th century, when the globe is overstimulated by its extravagant secular wonders.

Is it a miracle when the heart of a man newly dead is lifted from his chest and installed in another man who is dying -- whereupon the heart comes throbbing to life in the chest of the second man, and he walks away and lives on for years? The event is repeated every day on medical assembly lines around the world. What is surgical plumbing today would have been a biblical masterpiece of wonder. Even commonplace achievements of technology, like telephones, fax machines, television, communications satellites and computers, suffuse the earth with a sort of preternatural glow. The people of the industrialized world have become consumers of secularized miracles -- and the people of the Third World yearn for such products with a kind of religious ardor. Show a developing Polaroid picture to a man in a remote forest of Africa or South America. The developing image (his own, perhaps) seems to him more astonishing and supernatural than the Shroud of Turin.

Whose work are such miracles? Are they wonders divine or human? Traditional miracles -- for example, cures at Lourdes -- have a certain quaintness about them, a period quality. Unlike secular technological wonders, traditional religious miracles do not have to top themselves from one year to the next. Secular miracles become obsolete: the first silent movies were miraculous. Then the talkies were miraculous. Then television. When miracles can be superseded by new miracles, they have descended from the realm of the absolute. Miracles become mortal.

Can miracles be programmed onto microchips and still belong to the category of the miraculous? Can the wonder of the other world, the hypothetical perfection, be dreamed up, designed and turned into products? A perfect digital reproduction of the Ninth Symphony owes its miraculousness not to the manufacturer of the sound system but to the divinity in Beethoven's music.

The supernatural has taken a thousand routes into the ordinary world. Sometimes the deed is the miracle. A candidate to become a Manchu shaman might put on a miraculous performance by cutting nine holes in the ice in winter -- then diving into the first hole, emerging from the second hole, diving into the third and so on. Survival yields a shaman.

It is human nature to be awed by the electrical displays of God the Father. The deeper miracles are less garish. In any case, it is odd to look for healings, apparitions and other performance miracles when every bird's feather and fish's scale proclaims divinity. The miracle is creation itself.

Miracles take the form of lives. Abraham Lincoln was a miracle. Divinity poured almost spontaneously out of Mozart. Surely when it is time for the Catholic Church to canonize Mother Teresa, it will seem redundant for a panel of theologians in Rome to ask for proof of miracles she performed. She herself is the miracle.

A miracle makes an opening in the wall that separates this world and another. Divinity, another dimension, may flow through the aperture. A darker force could pass through the aperture as well. Or the whole thing may be only a magic trick.

The gaudier miracles are entertaining. A few of them may be authentic by Vatican standards. But a miracle without purpose is mostly a trick. Far from tourist trap and snake farm, there is the Ur-miracle from which all miracles derive. It is useful, simple, transforming and persuasive. It cannot be faked. It is love.

With reporting by D. Blake Hallanan/San Francisco