This essay appears in Issue 18 of The Mockingbird magazine.
Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature.
— C. S. Lewis
I used to make fun of the Israelites in the Old Testament. When I read things like, After so and so many days they forgot God’s favor to them and started worshiping idols or what have you, I’d think, O come on. If ever a people had seen proof, it was these. And not their ancestors even, but them. We get a still small voice; they had a pillar of fire leading them through the desert, and they started to believe maybe there is no God. Really? You don’t remember the walls of water you walked between in Egypt? Most of us have to hack it on faith, but these people had manifest evidence.
The other thing that used to annoy me was how often they repeated the story. The Egyptian deliverance is told over and over again. Do you remember the time your forefathers were brought out…? and I think how the hearers must have sighed: Yes, we recall. We hear about nothing else.
But those were miracles, so okay. If I won the lottery, I’d probably tell that story a few times too. What I’m wondering is what qualifies as a miracle worth recounting? And how far beyond the probable does an event need to be before we consider it miraculous in the first place? Do miracles need to help someone in order to qualify, or just to be inexplicable otherwise? Do they need to follow a prayer? Those are real questions. I don’t know how to answer any of them, so I could use some help thinking about these things.
I suppose I also have to tell you, in order for some of these events to make sense, that I’ve often been ridiculously poor: My student loan debt is in six figures, and I was a low-level humanities adjunct for a decade before finding a permanent academic position. Also, I have a family, and we live in a hot real estate market on one income. So when I say “poor,” I don’t mean “lower middle-class.” I mean that until recently, we sometimes went hungry when I didn’t make it to the food bank. As I will return to later, being poor might have something to do with the situations I mean to tell you about. The second caveat is that the occurrences I’m sharing here are in no way exhaustive, nor even selected by any criteria. This stuff happens all the time to me, to the astonishment of everyone around. It’s like I live in miracles. These things have been happening my whole life, so they don’t even feel strange to me until I assemble them, as here, and have a look.
One time I was studying abroad in Tintagel, England, and two of my attractive blonde classmates snuck out of the hostel to go for beers. Lads kept buying them shots at whatever pub they ended up in, and they stayed till the closing bell. I only know any of this because I dreamed it. A typical narrative of a dream. I could see where they were sitting in the bar, who was talking to them, that kind of thing.
Read the full essay at The Mockingbird (magazine, Issue 18) →
Originally published in The Mockingbird (magazine, Issue 18), 2021-09-02.
Image credit: Image from The Mockingbird (magazine, Issue 18) article page (https://mbird.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/1-e1630680266383.2.1.jpg)
