Re: Thanksgiving

[barbara wolf <lupa@biddeford.com>]

At 12:34 PM 1/22/96 BST, Ferdinand von Prondzynski wrote:
>
>"We are sometimes asked whether miracles happen here.  There
>have been cases of pilgrims reporting miraculous recovery from
>illnesses and disabilities, but we prefer to say that as
>pilgrims come here, they are able to look at themselves and
>their lives and to consider what God is saying to them.  When
>they leave us, they may have become a little bit more like God
>wants them to be.  Their physical ailments may not have
>changed, but God's Spirit has nevertheless worked a miracle in
>them."

This, plus other personal reflections on experience with "miracles", leads
me to start musing about the connection between miracles and the other
postings about God's will that have been showing up--especially with ref. to
"victims".

It seems to me that we call them "miracles" when we are inexplicably
delivered from pain or death or loss, and these are the same
events/occasions that drive us to speculate about God's will--situations,
that is, in which we'd much rather it *weren't* God's will that we suffer or
die or be victimized (or that someone we love might suffer, etc.).  We come
to believe that miracles do happen and wish to God they would happen to us
and our friends and families far more often than they seem to do. And, I
think, it's when the miracles don't come to pass that we begin struggling
with the q. of His will (to say nothing of q.'s about His omnipotence, the
problem of evil, and a whole bunch of anger and internal pain).

Which leads me back to the miracles in the Gospels (and in Acts as well).
It strikes me that all these contained something more than the sudden
alteration of the laws of physics or the physical circumstances of disease
and death.  They were all, so far as I can tell, interventions with a
*direction* to them.  They draw our attention to what (indeed, Who) is
beyond the here and now in a way that pulls us out of the immediate
occasion. God seems to be showing Himself as God, at the same time that He
is showing up our passion for "happy endings"; and the association of the
Gospel miracles with forgiveness of sin might just help us to re-examine our
notions about "happy" outcomes.

Yes, "considering what God is saying"  is precisely what miracles lead us to
do.  Even when we think they don't happen to us, I do think it's our myopia
that's often to blame, not some whimsical behavior on the part of God.




Barbara Wolf

        "But we've got to be careful not to reduce people by cramming
        them in the limits of our understanding, haven't we?"

                                                Reginald Hill