Symbol & Sign 3: Miracles

The Age of Miracles is the history of mankind. In the present day, we either ignore the miraculous and assume there is a natural explanation for the phenomenon, or we accept the reports of miracles but limit the miraculous to our own modern understanding of the Holy: all events that strain the laws of science are due to our own views of God and the world.

When I was young, the miracles at Lourdes were pushed to the forefront as proofs of the miraculous. Being such proofs, they were constrained even further to proofs of God's existence; who else works miracles if not God? The symbol of the Miraculous Cure which is intensely observed and scrutinized by medical science: a disease for which there is no known cure and the prognosis gives a very short time left to live, yet which is inexplicably cured upon pilgrimage to Lourdes was a potent Symbolic Structure in my youth. It probably still is. 

The signs of cures remain at Lourdes: crutches and wheelchairs rendered superfluous by the miraculous cure of their owners. I saw many such signs at Chimayo, where within the side chapel of Mary - the chapel wherein there is a hole in the floor and the sandy soil is exposed - there are many darkened and roughly made canes and crutches.

Yet these miracles only continue a tradition of the miraculous.

At the temple of Aesclapius - the ancient Greek god of medicinal arts - in Epidaurus, there are inscriptions which much like billboards attest to the cures done by Aesclapius and his priesthood and to miracles.

One goes:

A small speechless child came to the sanctuary to beseech the god to give him a voice. After performing all the preliminary sacrifices and rites, the Pyrphoros, the servant of the temple, turned to the father of the child and asked him, 'Do you promise to pay the medical fees within one year if your child is cured?' 'I promise,' replied the child suddenly.

There were cures done by the medical science of the time and there were also miraculous and sudden returns to health that were beyond the science of Hippocrates. We are not very aware of the miraculous in other times and other cultures. When we hear about such things, we tend to ascribe it to the primitive and credulous nature of the people involved. The antiquity of miracles has been ignored mainly due to intolerant zealotry exhibited by the early Christians once they gathered some portion of political power.
In the middle of the Tiber in Rome, there is an island upon which an ancient spital of Aesclapius stood (spital is one of the roots of hospital = house+spital). It was a favorite spot for slave owners to banish their incurably ill slaves to, prompting the Emperor Claudius to promulgate a law stating that any slaves thus treated, if they recovered from their illness, would be set free immediately, and their previous owners would have no claim whatever upon them. Time and war and the zealotry of religious fundamentalism have left almost nothing standing of it, for it had remained above ground and was subject to the depredations of the Romans. One inscription here reads:

To Julian who was spitting up blood and had been despaired of by everyone, the god advised that he should go and take the seeds of a pine cone from the threefold altar and he should eat them together with some honey for three days. And he was saved...

The history of miracles runs parallel to and is of equal length to the recorded history of mankind; as much as we can tell of the lives of intelligent beings on earth, they have experienced the miraculous.
Yet instead of taking the miraculous as a Symbol of the presence of the Holy and its power to make nonsense of whatever our science and knowledge is, we ignore it or we turn it into a tool of division - our religion is the true religion, for our god works miracles for us alone, or turn it into some holy circus where we ooh and aah.

The Universe is a place of Laws and Breaking of Laws. The lawful regularity fills us with wonder at the complexity of it all, while the miraculous breaking of the laws takes our breath away.
The world is filled with miracles.
And they are miracles because they go beyond our understanding.
But the entire point of miracles in the Christian Gospels at least is the simple statement of fact that our understanding is insufficient: even among the direct observers of a miracle there would be a significant percentage that would yet refuse to believe! Our understanding of miracles is the understanding of children, and at some point we must give up the "toys" of childhood and accept that God is in the world - not out of it and merely popping in every now and then to work a miracle!

When the Holy is remote and outside the world, we have taken the Symbol of the Holy and debased it. Miracles are not signs and omens to be argued over: they are the wind of Life upon which we are the gliders! I remembered vividly how I used to pray, and it was very much like setting out cookies for Santa Claus: a bribe for an intercession and a gift of forgiveness. We really do not have to remind God. Let the World return to its miraculous state! And those who debase it and sully it should be shamed, not rewarded  by wealth, office, and power!

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