dry grass singing

signs and wonders

"Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe."
- John 4:48

We all love the spectacular, the extraordinary. As children, which of us did not gape in wonder at the sight of fabulous fireworks exploding in the night, the heady mix of colour and sound fading slowly into wispy tendrils of light? And later in life, how many of us have not been fascinated by tales of the supernatural – the virgin birth, the miraculous healing of fifty-two cripples at a famous pilgrimage site, the overnight conversion of the wife-and-alcohol abuser into a saintly father-figure and motivational speaker?

All the things that i used to call, at a time of general bitterness and cynicism, God's burning-bush party-tricks.

For the past few weeks, though, i've been thinking about the miracle of the ordinary. It seems to me now that even our waking up each morning is a miracle in itself, a miracle that too many of us take entirely for granted. And the only reason we don't see it as such is because our minds have been dulled by custom, lulled into complacency by habit, such that we no longer see the poetry in the everyday.

But that begs the larger question of what exactly constitutes the miraculous. According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:

miracle · n. 1. an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws, attributed to a divine agency -> a remarkable and very welcome occurrence. 2. an amazing product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something: a miracle of design.
- origin ME: via OFr. from L. miraculum ‘object of wonder’, from mirari ‘to wonder’, from mirus ‘wonderful’.

The first definition is of particular interest, because it seems to assume firstly that natural or scientific laws are somehow independent of any sort of divine agency. This is a rather strange assumption, given that most major theistic world religions do attribute the natural world (and therefore the laws that govern it) to the work of a divine agency. It also suggests that anything that is explicable by natural or scientific laws (which, by the way, seems to me to be another illogical dichotomy) is neither extraordinary nor particularly welcome.

Yet, if we only stop to think about it, we'd realise that everything which we are to perceive in this world is, in its own way, ‘an amazing product or achievement’, ‘a miracle of design’. The earth that nourishes the olive tree. The sunlight reflected in the diaphanous wings of a common dragonfly. The dirty roadside puddle that harbours a million living organisms. The fossilised remains of long-dead plants and animals that fuel our vehicles and industries. The tired commuter slumped in his seat on the rush-hour bus who sees the world, responds to that world, and thus creates a world, in a way that is uniquely, unequivocally his own.

With such an abundance of daily miracles happening and existing around us at every moment, perhaps it is for the best that we don’t usually see them as such. Perhaps there is only so much wonder the human mind can take, and our habitual dullness of perception is a coping mechanism, designed to help us get on with the necessary work of daily life, uninterrupted by the over-stimulation of the senses that would result from being in a state of constant rapture. And perhaps that is, in itself, a miracle worth celebrating.

posted by eothen @ 4:42 PM