teleology

If I could laugh every day until my stomach writhed in pain, I think I would die a deliriously happy girl.

on disabilities, and why I believe in miracles

I'm still thinking about miracles--those events which so violently oppose the laws of nature we've formulated that they require some sort of supernatural explanation. Some suggest that certain laws can be violated, but only by other laws. For example, the law of gravity be superseded by aerodynamics. A more Christian question might ask whether God's grace supersede the laws of sin and death, a deeply serious question centered around Christ's death and resurrection. I had lunch with a professor I trust deeply and asked him point blank whether he believes in miracles. "My daughter giving birth was a miracle," he responded after a moment, suggesting that miracles been "prepared for," a thoughtful God writing their possibilities into the fabric of time and space, even if we don't understand their physics. While that didn't entirely answer my question the way I'd posed it (as a scientific one--the framing of religious questions in scientific language is another conversation), it did make me think for a very long time. I struggle with the typical scientist's ego: I have studied this world enough that I can make assumptions about its behavior, and I know enough of the world's details to understand its grandeur. We can manufacture artificial limbs, hearts, even faces. Are we engaged in creativity? or miracle-performance?

While the definition of "miracle" is necessary (as is any definition when you want to have a thoughtful conversation about its implications), it is debated. Perhaps it requires supernatural explanation. Perhaps they don't happen (indeed, some thoughtful and God-fearing churches have the official stance that miracles were limited to the apostolic age). The mere fact that there are saliences in our world, the mere fact that sometimes things don't happen as we-in-our-wisdom would predict should be so incredibly humbling, and smacks, perhaps, of a God who still smiles when we try to amass all our knowledge and turn it into official canon of biblical proportions.

I was particularly struck by this in a sermon and a small experience I had on Sunday. Again I ventured into Boston to go to Park Street Church, this time with a group of girls from my floor. We were speaking in the car of disabilities, as one of my girls' sisters has severe dyslexia and has struggled for years with learning how to read, something I so flippantly regard as simple. Park Street Church was celebrating Enable Boston Sunday this particular day, a day to remember those in the congregation and greater Boston area who struggle with all sorts of disabilities. One woman gave a testimony, speaking of her son's head injury that has since left him with severe short-term memory loss, an inability to speak, and myriad other supposed "disabilities." Mrs. McLeod, however, spoke to her son's strange interactions with God, telling us stories of finding her son awake at 3 in the morning, praying at the side of his bed. Pastor Gordon Hugenberger then got up and spoke on Ehud, a man disabled in his right hand yet who used his right hand to slay the evil Moabite king (Judges 3 v 12-30). He then pointed out that we all suffer from a certain disability--the disability of sleep. We are all limited by this crazy one third of our lives that we spend asleep. Depriving ourselves of sleep is psychologically damaging at best, fatal at worst.

Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.”

(1 Corinthians 1:26-31)

I left the church in a weird mood. Moving forward with my group's lunch plans--a visit to an improvisational diner called "Fire and Ice," which lets you watch your (unlimited) choice of raw vegetables, meats, pastas, etc. and sauce be cooked by master chefs on a giant center flat grill. I was waiting for a brunch omelette to be prepared when there was a little commotion beside me. A group of disabled adults from a home in Boston had come to Fire and Ice on a field trip, and the man next to me didn't realize that you're not supposed to mix your sauce with your food before given to the chef. It makes the food more flavourful and easier to cook if the sauce is added to the mix toward the end, and so while the chef gently suggested that Tom (the man next to me) hold onto his sauce the next time so he could enjoy an even yummier plate, Tom just couldn't process what was being said to him, and he looked at me with the most sorrowful expression of guilt--what had he done wrong?? And so I gently and more slowly explained what I thought the chef was trying to say. Perhaps he was grateful for my kind voice, or perhaps he was just excited to talk to someone (and show off his nifty ID card:-)), but his appreciation was so overwhelming that I had to go to the bathroom to cry for a few minutes.

I think humility is a miracle. I think I tend SO MUCH toward pride and arrogance that any small act of gratefulness toward me that drives me to my modest knees can't be part of the way I naturally function. In all my egoism and smugness as to how much knowledge I've accrued in my short time here, I'm still at the mercy of God, and how much he knows about what I truly care about. That he knows me so well to bless me as he wills and to show me the depths of my sin--I can think of no other word than miracle.

And that I'm crying as I recall the experience is no less miraculous. I'm so grateful for the ways in which the Lord seems to say "See? I TOLD you I know you better than anyone else!" He weaves himself in and out of our stories so effortlessly and yet so powerfully, as if proving to us that we are never out of his immediate grasp. So I don't pray for evidence of his presence anymore; I pray to be battered, like John Donne's INCREDIBLE poem. Humble me, and show me why I'm little.

Worlds...and miracles therein?

For Alexander there was no Far East,

Because he thought the Asian continent

India ended. Free Cathay at least

Did not contribute to his discontent.

But Newton, who had grasped all space, was more

Serene. To him it seemed that he'd but played

With several shells and pebbles on the shore

Of that profundity he had not made.

(Richard Wilbur)

I'm taking a class this semester called "Reality with Physics and Philosophy," an exploration of the physical laws that govern this monster we call the universe and how those might accommodate an active God or exclude an inactive one--or vice versa on both accounts. Now Schrodinger's cat makes sense to me, that the quantum mechanics of the universe suggest a probabilistic universe, even if that flies in the face of intuition and instinct. I understand general relativity as a reworking of the laws of gravitation that become problematic when we leave the earth's atmosphere, and time dilation and length contraction are all understandable in terms of Star Trek analogies (a Klingon ship approaches the Enterprise at warp speed with a photon beam that can only shoot perpendicularly to its target--should Captain Kirk fear for the crew's safety, or is Spock correct in assuring the worried Captain that all will be well??). Hume and Polkinghorne and discussions on miracles, however, are all entirely bothersome to me.

"Suppose," Hume offers, "for instance, that the fact, which the testimony endeavours to establish, partakes of the extraordinary and the marvellous; in that case, the evidence, resulting from the testimony, admits of a diminution, greater or less, in proportion as the fact is more or less unusual. The reason why we place any credit in witnesses and historians, is not derived from any connexion, which we perceive a priori, between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them. But when the fact attested is such a one as has seldom fallen under our observation, here is a contest of two opposite experiences; of which the one destroys the other, as far as its force goes, and the superior can only operate on the mind by the force, which remains. The very same principle of experience, which gives us a certain degree of assurance in the testimony of witnesses, gives us also, in this case, another degree of assurance against the fact, which they endeavour to establish; from which contradiction there necessarily arises a counterpoize, and mutual destruction of belief and authority."

I'll forgive his disgusting overuse of commas and launch right into discontent--a miracle is something with a probability of zero. Lazarus being raised from the dead directly and violently violates of physics and the nature of death. Blind people being granted sight before Jordy's goggles even planted that idea in modern audiences' minds SHOULD NOT HAPPEN. Can the superior experiences of those who have died staying that way apart from our mythologies, of those born without sight forever resigned to encounter this world differently (not inadequately, just differently) be contradicted by Hume's opposite experience of a miracle...and win? Are there miracles? I had lunch with a professor I trust very much and asked him this question. "My daughter giving birth," he said, "was a miracle." Personally, my uncle was shot over 90% of his body and given less than a 1% chance of survival. To this day he professes the miracle of healing. But he wasn't dead. Have miracles been downgraded in our scientifically-advantaged times? Are they simply "cool things that happen," or are we actually having experiences with the divine? Have miracles been "prepared for," a thoughtful God writing their possibilities into the fabric of time and space, even if we don't understand their physics?

I suppose you can infer my real question--does God interact with the world he supposedly set in motion? I wish I could say yes, but I'm afraid that more and more I lean the other way...I want SO BADLY to believe in the God who cries over our suffering, and admits no design for it in creation but works against it in our sin, but I listened to a radio broadcast with a rabbi a while ago who has struggled heartbreakingly with the death of his son forty years ago of progeria (rapid-aging syndrome) and says he and God have reached "an accommodation with each other," recognizing each other's weaknesses and yet caring deeply for each other. Do miracles even matter, then? Some churches have the official stance that miracles were limited to the apostolic age, but then I think some working definition of miracle is necessary (of course it has been from the beginning, but even more so when drawing comparisons to Jesus' ministry and ours). Is it a phenomenological one, trying to explain events? Is it an epistemological one, trying to understand facts that don't quite fit our notion of truth? Is in an ontological one, trying to understand why things are the way they are?

So Polkinghorne (who only allows one miracle: the Resurrection) and Augustine (who preaches the presence of God at all times) don't really get along. And I can see how non-Christians might see miracles as evidence of a discriminating God. But again--the first thing we need is a definition. Perhaps all things can be explained in hindsight--hands healing back, only being able to read Scripture, the Red Sea parting for the Israelites...but perhaps the timing of such events matters more than we know. Perhaps the natural processes of this world can result in phenomena, but perhaps it is the timing that has been prepared for by God--those "one in a trillion" chances--that lay the foundation for God's dealings with humanity, and allow us to struggle with the ways we think he interacts with a fallen world that claims no need of him...

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (by William Carlos Williams, ecphrastically on Pieter Brueghel's painting of the same name)

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

you should go outside

...but not before listening to this song by Joanna Newsom.

DO IT.