It's A Miracle

January 8, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     The other day I was changing in the locker room at the gym, when a hunched-over older man came to the bench where I stood and began to do the same.  As he went toward a locker to hang up his clothes he said, pretty much apropos of nothing, “Every day is a miracle.”  By that I assume he meant that he felt fortunate to be alive, and that he was glad to be able to work out at the gym.
 

     Well good for him, I thought, but why is that a miracle?  When I was growing up and going to Sunday school, we were given to believe that miracles supernatural things.  In fact, when I looked up the word "miracle" in the dictionary just now, it defined it that way, to wit:  a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.  Getting thrown into a fiery furnace and not being burned, for example, is a miracle; feeding thousands of people with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish is a miracle; a virgin getting pregnant (however dubiously welcome that experience might be in real life) is miraculous.  Maybe my idea of miracles is heavily influenced by bible stories, but still, I thought, unless this old guy I encountered dies every night and is brought back to life in the morning, or arrives at the gym by means of a magic carpet, I just don’t see how every day is a miracle, to him or anyone else.

     Of course we all know that today the word “miracle” has gone down the road of absurd hyperbole (hand in hand with adjectives like “awesome”), such that it is used almost universally to mean exceptionally good, or against the odds, or sometimes just out of the ordinary.  “It’s a miracle we made it here on time, what with traffic,” we’ll say, or “It was a miracle she survived that accident,” when what we really mean is such cases is, “We sure as hell didn’t expect that!”  This all bespeaks more a sincere but mistaken subjective evaluation of a likely outcome than any objective supernatural event.  Apparently, by the way, the definition of “miracle” is completely missing a negative component.  Miracles are always good things.  When things go unexpectedly wrong we don’t call that a miracle; we’re more likely to call it a "tragedy"--another unfortunate misuse of a perfectly good word.  In bygone days (and even today in many religions) both the good and the bad were ascribed to the Almighty and to the adherence of the faithful, or lack thereof, to the necessary prescribed forms of worship.  Thus when the sun came up in the east each morning, or when it rained after a drought, it was considered a miracle brought about by ardent prayers for divine intercession, and when a hurricane or an earthquake came it was because we somehow failed to kiss God’s ass with enough alacrity.  I suppose that giving the deity credit for everything, good and bad, is in some ways more consistent and honest than considering only the cool stuff to be miraculous.  But to think that human intervention helps miracles to happen is just plain ridiculous.    

     One of my favorite meaningless betes noires in this vein is the expression, sometimes slung about by religion hucksters on television, “Expect a miracle; make miracles happen.”  Which is silly, since miracles are by their very nature unexpected events, and most certainly not anything any mortal being can accomplish.  Another one I hear from time to time is “I am a miracle.”  To that let me simply reply, “No.  You are not.”

     The easiest thing to do when confronted with such illogical behavior is to label it stupid and leave it at that.  Most of us know there is more than enough stupidity to go around, and stopping the analysis at "stupid" saves us the trouble of having to figure out why we repeatedly do the dumb things we do.  But a more responsible approach might be to speculate about why people are so prone to calling things miracles when they are manifestly not miracles.  The most obvious answer is that we are prone to seeking linguistic shortcuts, often misusing words until, after many instances of such misuse, they succeed in changing the meaning of a word.  But another possible answer is that we persist in calling things miraculous because there are, in fact, no miracles in real life, and--poor us--we wish that there were.  That also explains why we are so preoccupied with the idea of aliens having visited earth.  Miracles only happen in the realm of myth and legend, and religions stay in business by commemorating those legendary miracles and making folks think that more miracles may be just around the corner.

     The slightly more intelligent religions, like Judaism, take a more nuanced view of the miraculous.  Modern Jews celebrate the traditional scriptural miracles of the past, like the passing over of the Angel of Death and the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, as part of their cultural heritage.  But their core belief is that however chosen by God they might be, they are condemned to an existence that is always a hair’s breadth away from horror and annihilation, chiefly because God is easily pissed off by disloyalty or just by being ignored or taken for granted, and owes them exactly nothing.  They're chosen all right, but they have been chosen by a peevish, jealous, and often indifferent God.  Follow the rules, live righteously, and be just and merciful to your fellow man and you might just be okay.  Or not.  You never know.  The million-pound shit hammer might come crashing down on even the righteous.  Look at the story of Job.  The guy did nothing wrong; he just got in the middle of a celestial pissing contest between God and Satan.  Job was your average  prosperous and righteous dude, always doing what was expected of him.  God was so sure that Job wouldn't renounce him that he gave Satan permission to kill his family, his livestock, his crops, and damn near destroy his body.  He had sores covering him from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.  After all this only Job and his wife remained, but sure enough, Job didn't renounce God, so he got a new family (fuck the kids who died when the roof fell in on them, I guess--collateral damage), and he prospered again.  And this is how the God of the Jews treats the good guys, the loyal guys, the troopers.  Holy shit.  One is tempted to think, after reading this story, that it doesn't much matter whether you're one of God's chosen people or not, or even if there is a God.  And many have thought just this.   

     Christians also celebrate the mythical miracles that brought their religion into existence—the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus, to name a couple of the big ones.  The difference between them and Jews in this regard is that the Christians, like little children, believe not only that those miracles actually happened, but that more miracles are just around the corner.  Maybe the more pessimistic Jewish view is what an extra few thousand years of maturity brings to a religion.  I don’t know.  But with respect to the Christians, it explains why everyone is so determined to see miracles hiding behind every burning bush.  What would life be like, the thinking goes, without at least a few little miracles here and there, and perhaps a big one now and then?  It would be predictable and repetitive.  And predictable and repetitive are things an immature person, or immature religion, just can't stand.  So people all over the world wait for miracles, and when they don't get them, they fudge the definition of miraculous to include the more pedestrian events of everyday life, like active old age, close calls, and recoveries from grave illnesses.

     I do believe that it would take a miracle to convince the average person that there are no miracles.  And who am I to cause such a thing to happen?