Miracles

Did you ever hear the story of Audrey Santo, a Worcester, Mass., girl left virtually brain dead from a pool accident, who lived for over a decade in almost a vegetative state in her mother's home in Massachusetts. (Here's the Wikipedia page.) There were a number of alleged miracles associated with her during her life (she died this past April), and she developed something of a following. In 1997, the Washington Post did a really good piece on Audrey, exploring the phenomenon from various angles. The author, Gene Weingarten, is a self-described atheist, and while he didn't take a position on the alleged supernatural qualities of the Audrey situation -- there's enough in the story to bolster doubters, and to bolster believers too -- he did find the heroic devotion of Audrey's mother to her to be a non-supernatural miracle. In May, briefly recounting his experience with the story in a blog posting not long after her death, Weingarten disclosed something interesting that he'd left out of the original story:

There are two additional oddities related to the story. The first occurred in my hotel room in Worcester, the night I stayed there. As always, when I went to bed, I emptied my pockets and threw the contents on the dresser. In the morning, when I awoke, I saw that the change in my pocket was in the shape of a cross. A nearly perfect cross. I looked at it, then looked left and right -- the room was of course empty -- and did what people do when they are unaccountably upset. I burst out laughing. Cannot explain this event, to this day, except that to be an atheist, one still needs to believe, strongly, in something: Coincidence.

Still gives me the creeps a little, if you want to know the truth.

For religious believers, stories like Audrey's leave three possibilities:

1. That it's true, and a miracle of God. 2. That it's false, and a human deception. 3. That it's supernatural, but a false miracle worked by diabolical entities.

Now, for a pure materialist there is only one possible answer, and that is that the phenomenon has a natural explanation, even if there is no conscious human deception at work. I find strong materialists as unbendingly dogmatic as hard-core apparition-chasers, and therefore only of limited assistance in trying to sort these things out. The fact is that for Christians, belief in the possibility of miracles is obligatory. The gospels are full of miracles worked by Jesus, and both the New and the Old Testaments tell of them. Besides, lots of ordinary people have had things happen to them that defy explanation, and seem to disclose the hand of God.

A modest example: when I was a small boy, one of my friends from a nearby town, who may have been eight or nine years old, drove his motorcycle off a cliff by a creek. The engine landed on his head, knocking a piece out of his skull. My dad went on the rescue, and found the skull fragment after they'd Air-Medded the boy to the hospital. Surgeons had to wash M.'s brain free of sand before they could begin to work on him. They soon had to transport M. to a bigger hospital in Houston, which was more capable of treating him. For a couple of weeks, M.'s parents kept constant vigil as their son hovered between life and death.

In the middle of the night, M.'s mother was sitting alone in the waiting room on the children's wing, exhausted from worry. She looked up and saw next to her a gentle lady wearing blue -- those were the only things M.'s mom remembered about the woman -- comforting her, and telling her not to be afraid, that her son would live. Then the lady in blue left. Shortly thereafter, doctors said that M. had turned the corner, and would make it (which he did, though somewhat brain-damaged). When M.'s mother asked the nurses who had been watching over the waiting room at their station that night if they knew who the lady in blue was who had spoken the word of comfort, for M.'s mother, assuming Blue Lady was the mother of a hospitalized child, the nurses told M.'s mother that no one but her had been in the waiting room that night.

It is possible, of course, that M.'s mother hallucinated the Blue Lady out of her intense anxiety. I believe it is possible that she was visited by an angel, or the Virgin. That is what M.'s mother believes happened.

I've met numerous people to whom things like this have happened, though they are often reluctant to talk about them.

When I first became an adult Christian, it was because of a miracle having to do with the Virgin. It's too complicated to go into here, but I had been praying to someone I wasn't even sure was there, out of desperation. I was in a bad place, and wanted out of it, but I didn't want to be a Christian. For some reason, I prayed to the Virgin, asking her to show me the way out and to God, if she and He were really there. A set of extraordinary coincidences occurred that knocked me back, and forced me to accept that it really was true, and that I had seen something that couldn't be explained. I could have rationalized it away, I suppose, but the coincidences were so unusual, and so utterly specific to my situation, that it would have taken more willpower at that point to deny what I had experienced than to accept it, and the implications those meaningful coincidences had for my life.

It also happened around that time that I met an extraordinary elderly Catholic priest, Msgr Carlos Sanchez, whom I'd gone to interview in his retirement home, about his career as an art professor, which he'd been before he entered the priesthood. He was in his 90s, but looked much younger (I have a photo of him in my living room; his face glows). He was the most gentle soul I've ever encountered. We sat down to talk about art, and he told me the story about how he'd been a convinced atheist until an extraordinary miracle happened to him in the 1930s, that convinced him God absolutely existed. God came to him the same way 20 years later and invited him to the priesthood. The old man sat there and talked to me about events that happened 60 years earlier, and wept, as if they'd happened yesterday.

I was deeply moved by his testimony. I could never prove that these things really happened, of course, but the fact that these brief, spectacular events caused an obviously brilliant and worldly man to alter profoundly the course of his life made quite an impression on me.

It was also around this time that I got to know an exorcist priest. I went with him and his team on a mission having to do with a haunted house, and saw things that absolutely could not be explained by natural means. I saw an old woman lifted up and thrown backward over a chair. I saw a candle rise out of a candlestick with no one near the table -- a table at which we'd all just been eating -- fly across the table and land in a chair. And I've blogged before about all the bizarre supernatural happenings around my parents' house after the troubled death of my grandfather, and how the exorcist came and took care of it, with amazing and inexplicable results. This I witnessed, as did my mom and dad.

None of this proves the existence of God. But it did convince me through direct experience (as distinct from pure faith) that there is a such thing as the supernatural world.

Now, I saw so many unusual things in those early days of my adult faith that I became credulous. Like I blogged the other day about the fake weeping icon of Blanco, I had come to believe too easily in miracles. My faith wasn't shaken years later, when it became clear that the Blanco icon was a fake, because I'd grown in maturity, and understood that even a believer ought to be deeply skeptical of such phenomenon. The saints had lots of wisdom in advising people to resist these things. They can lead to a shallow faith, or mislead a person into believing things that aren't true, or set one up for a fall, or any number of destructive consequences. Today if somebody told me about a miracle, my first reaction would be serious skepticism, along the lines of, "Great, if true, but my faith doesn't stand or fall on that sort of thing, and aren't we really better off focusing on the basics of the faith -- loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind, and loving our neighbors as ourselves -- rather than chasing after alleged miracles?" It just seems to me to be a far more sound place to stand.

A good friend of mine, a former atheist who was converted to Catholicism after his parents dragged him to Medjugorje, and he experienced things there that his rationalism couldn't explain, later became a priest. Today, though, he strongly downplays claims of miracles, apparitions and the like. It's not that he doesn't believe they can happen; it's that he's seen enough bad stuff come out of apparition-chasing that he doesn't want to encourage that kind of faith. Think about that: here is a man who was once an atheist and is now a Catholic priest because he initially believed he witnessed miracles. But now that he's older and more experienced, he counsels the faithful to keep these things very much at arm's length. Wisdom, let us attend.

(While I'm thinking about it, I can't recommend highly enough a book called "The Miracle Detective" by Randall Sullivan. It is a gripping, highly personal story of the author, best known as a Rolling Stone writer, going to Medjugorje to investigate purported miracles around alleged apparitions of the Virgin occurring there. As with many of these events, there's enough there to make you believe that there really is something supernatural going on, but also enough to make you doubtful. The author reaches no firm conclusion, but it's fascinating to watch him wrestle personally with his own astonishment and doubt.)

Here's how I learned my lesson about the relative importance of miracles. It involved a miracle.

In the fall of 1993, I'd quit my job in Washington and moved back to south Louisiana to be closer to my family. My sister and her husband had just had their first child, and I felt homesick. I had long wanted to work in Washington, but the birth of that child made me rethink my vocation. Maybe I was supposed to be close to home? I moved into a friend's plantation house (Weyanoke, for readers of "Crunchy Cons") to live alone that winter and think and pray about my future. I assumed I'd apply to grad school, and wrote off for applications.

I prayed a lot. I prayed the rosary a lot. I read and thought a lot. And then, after Christmas, I took a trip to Norway to visit a friend. While on this trip, I experienced a series of astonishing synchronicities on this journey, each one followed that night by an especially intense dream. After the third such dream, I woke up in my hotel room in Bergen, and wrote a long letter to a Catholic friend in Washington. My friend was knowledgeable about dreams, and serious about his faith. He knew little of my personal history, which I thought made him ideal for interpreting the symbolism in the dreams. I mailed the letter from Bergen, and asked him to write me with his ideas in Louisiana.

A few days after I returned, his answer arrived. It floored me. Without getting into too much boring detail, the dreams, in his uncanny interpretation, described my intellectual, emotional and spiritual progression since childhood. The final dream, my friend said, indicated that I was being called by my destiny -- he said God -- to leave my family and place of birth, though my family didn't and couldn't understand it. I needed to be at peace with this, and to stop feeling burdened by the guilt of having moved far from home. That was what my friend's letter said.

Another letter arrived the same day, also from Washington. It was an invitation to rejoin the staff of the Washington Times.

You might think: prayers answered! Go with God! But you wouldn't be me. See, I was expecting a Big Sign. These things weren't enough for me. I called the Times and told them I was interested, but not sure. I was given a couple of weeks to think about it.

Then I got involved with a story I reported for the Baton Rouge Advocate, about a man who'd come to town, bought an old plantation, and set about trying to evict a poor black congregation that had been worshiping on the property since their slave ancestors were evangelized in the early 1800s. My stories made the national wires. CNN came down to report on it, as did the New York Times. I was passionate about the story too, and got the whole town riled up about it, rallying behind the little church. My mom and dad were proud of me, and saw what good I could do through journalism. They saw how happy it made me. They took me aside and told me that I could go back to Washington with their blessing.

You're thinking: prayers answered! Go with God! You wouldn't be me. I was waiting for a Big Sign.

And so, we came to a Friday afternoon. I had to make a call to Washington to accept the job that day, or the opportunity would pass. I was up at Weyanoke that weekend, hosting a houseguest. My friend K. was going through a painful divorce, and I'd invited her up to the country to rest and get her head together. She was not a religious person, but she'd been receiving comfort from a co-worker who was a believer, and wanted to talk about God. K. and I sat at the kitchen table that afternoon and talked for a long time about faith, and suffering. At some point, I looked at my watch and realized it was getting late on the east coast. I excused myself to use the phone. K. said she would take a walk outside in the garden.

I took a deep breath, phoned DC, accepted the job and was told to report in a couple of weeks. When I hung up, I took my rosary into a downstairs bedroom, shut the door, and sat down to pray. I told the Virgin that while I hadn't received the sign I'd wanted, I knew she had helped my discernment with her prayers, and for that I was thankful. I asked her to hold K.'s hand through the divorce. Then I began to pray the rosary, in thanksgiving for her prayers on my behalf.

When I arrived at the second glorious mystery -- the Ascension, in which Jesus promised to remain with his people forever, even though he was about to ascend bodily into heaven -- the room filled with sunlight (this, on an overcast January day) and the powerful aroma of roses. I was startled; nothing like that had ever happened to me. I slowed my rosary down to a crawl, and breathed in deeply. It was as if the room were filled with fresh-cut roses. When I reached the end of that decade of the rosary, the sunlight went away, as did the aroma of roses. Just like that. After I finished my rosary, I searched the room all over for perfume, or anything that could have given off the scent of roses. Nothing.

I knew that I'd been given my big sign. But it came after I'd made my decision, and served to confirm that I'd made the right decision. I knew that God was trying to tell me that it was wrong to put Him to the test like that, and to rely on obvious signs. Hadn't the small things that had happened to me in my discernment process been enough? Didn't He give me enough to make that decision through reason? Hadn't it been enough for my parents, after having seen the good I could do through journalism, and my passion for it, to give me their blessing?

And that was my lesson in miracles. Yes, they really do happen, and when they do, let us give thanks for them. But we shouldn't demand them or expect them, and we should let God work in our lives in ordinary ways. He gives us enough as it is. Blessed are they who have not seen miracles, but still believe.

Now, you might be thinking that I hallucinated the aroma of roses, because I'd been anticipating a sign for so long, and couldn't bear the thought that the whole drama of discernment was over without having received one. That would be a reasonable conclusion. But it doesn't account for this one last thing.

After finishing my rosary prayer in the bedroom, I went upstairs to make up beds and straighten up. I heard the front door open and close, and K. come thumping up the stairs. She walked into the room where I was, her eyes huge, her left hand gripping her right arm by the wrist. She held out her right hand, palm up, to me.

"Smell this," she half-whispered.

I did. It smelled powerfully of roses. I asked her if she'd put perfume on it, or washed it in floral soap. No, she said, nothing like that. She said that when she came in, she heard me upstairs and decided to come up and help me. Halfway up the stairs, she rubbed her nose, and discovered this weird rose smell.

"I just had a miracle happen to me with the scent of roses," I told her, breathlesly. "It's the sign of the Virgin Mary. I asked her in my prayers to hold your hand through this tough time for you."

K. and I just stared at each other, astonished. Then her hand didn't smell like roses anymore. Just like that.

Two weeks later, I went back to Washington. On the day I returned, news broke that the little black church had been saved. And so, in the process, had my future.