Miracles
Page 1
ALSO BY ERIC METAXAS
Amazing Grace:
William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery
Bonhoeffer:
Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
7 Men and the Secret of Their Greatness
Life, God, and Other Small Topics:
Conversations from Socrates in the City (Editor)
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All Miracle Stories used with permission. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
“Seven Stanzas at Easter” from Telephone Poles and Other Poems by John Updike, copyright © 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission.
“Seven Stanzas at Easter” (35 lines) from Telephone Poles and Other Poems by John Updike (Deutsch, 1963) copyright © John Updike, 1963.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Metaxas, Eric.
Miracles : what they are, why they happen, and how they can change your life / Eric Metaxas.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-698-16142-9
1. Miracles. I. Title.
BT97.3.M48 2014
231.7'3—dc23 2014025734
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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For Ed Tuttle—
and with best wishes to practically everybody else I know.
CONTENTS
ALSO BY ERIC METAXAS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE
THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES
1 BELIEVING IN MIRACLES
2 WHAT IS A MIRACLE?
3 MIRACLES AND SCIENCE
4 IS LIFE A MIRACLE?
5 THE MIRACLE OF THE UNIVERSE
6 QUESTIONS ABOUT MIRACLES
7 THE BIBLICAL MIRACLES
8 THE RESURRECTION
PART TWO
THE MIRACLE STORIES
INTRODUCTION TO THE MIRACLE STORIES
9 CONVERSION MIRACLES
10 HEALING MIRACLES
11 MIRACLES OF INNER HEALING
12 ANGELIC MIRACLES
13 VARIETIES OF MIRACLES
14 TOUCHING ETERNITY
15 HOW MIRACLES CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Miracles are not in contradiction to nature. They are only in contradiction with what we know of nature.
—SAINT AUGUSTINE
But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. . . .
If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favor of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism—the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of medieval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Medieval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But medievals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say, “A peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.
—G. K. CHESTERTON, FROM ORTHODOXY
INTRODUCTION
Most readers will consider this volume a departure from my previous oeuvre, and from my recent biographies it is certainly a departure. In fact, the subjects of those books, William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, do not seem to have had any experiences that could be described as miraculous, at least not in the sense of that word as it is used in this book. Their deeply inspiring lives—their extraordinary actions and accomplishments—were manifestly fueled by their passionate faith in the God of the Bible, yet we have no record of that God speaking to them or revealing himself to them in any ways that would qualify for mention in a book like this. So perhaps we should let their exemplary lives stand as evidence that one can have a world-changing and even saintly life of faith without miraculous experiences. This is a helpful counterpoint to the thinking that these experiences are the ne plus ultra of the Christian faith. On the other hand, let this book and the accounts herein stand as a helpful counterpoint to those who believe such stories impossible.
In considering what form this book should take, I felt a large part of it should be miracle stories themselves, since they are perhaps the best evidence we can have for miracles. (Some readers may wish to skip directly to those stories and read the first part of this book second, a choice I would cheerfully countenance.) I decided to limit the book only to the stories of people I knew personally. This naturally limits the scope of what stories I could include, but the advantage is that I wouldn’t have to wonder about the character and credibility of the people telling these stories. It also underscores how tremendously prevalent such stories are. I did not scour the known world for these tales but only asked people I knew well e
nough to trust their accounts. There are many friends and acquaintances I did not ask because it became clear to me that had I asked every friend for stories like these, I would have had far too much material for this book and might never have finished it. But the wealth of the miracle stories I was able to find within a fairly close circle of friends makes one wonder how many other stories are out there among my friends, and yours.
I vetted these stories and all their details as carefully as possible. It was vital to me to get as much specificity as I could, and anything that did not seem clearly to be a miracle, I simply did not include. I often asked questions to get clarification on things. Many times the person telling the story was assuming something that—unless I teased it out and made it explicit—would have felt like a hole, whether in the logic of the story or in the artistic shape of it, or both. I asked questions I thought the reader would ask and tried to answer them in the course of telling the story.
I heard some stories that very likely were miracles but that might have been natural coincidences. The slightest question in my mind whether something was genuinely miraculous eliminated it from consideration. But all in all, listening to people tell these stories of God’s direct intervention in their lives was tremendously affecting. It is humbling and exhilarating and it can be simultaneously enlightening and stupefying, because the idea that the God of the universe would humble himself to touch the lives of any of us is, in the end, far beyond our full comprehension.
To those who might think these stories merely subjective accounts and not objective evidence, it must be said that history comprises the subjective accounts of human beings; and from these subjective accounts we arrive at an “objective” truth—which is itself still somehow and to some extent subjective. There can never be a question whether such things are subjective; the only real question can be whether those subjective accounts are reliable. Answers to that question are themselves subjective, depending on the point of view and presumptions of the person making that judgment. This is not to say that there is no such thing as objective truth, or to lead us into a swamp of relativism. On the contrary, it is to say that we must do the hard work of sifting what information we have, of carefully considering the witnesses, as it were. This is what every jury must do when it decides a case in law, and it is what every person must do in deciding what to make of any story. Here we stand. We can do no other. To shrink from that task is to shrink from life itself.
PART ONE
THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES
1
BELIEVING IN MIRACLES
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
—C. S. LEWIS
In a 2013 article in The New Yorker about faith and belief, Adam Gopnik wrote the following: “We know that . . . in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession [sic] with the laws of nature.”
I thought this was an extraordinary statement. To anyone who has experienced the miraculous or who knows people who have experienced it, or who is familiar with the literature of miraculous accounts, it’s difficult to imagine being so confidently dismissive of something that seems at the very least to be entirely possible, and at best to be entirely certain. As someone who lives in Manhattan and who is familiar with the world in which such writers live, I’m afraid I’m not all that surprised. Nonetheless, it’s extraordinary. In the article, Gopnik continues: “We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain.”
Of course, the reason the writer makes these statements has to do with his presupposition that this world is all there is. That way of seeing the world dismisses outright any possibility of anything beyond the material world of time and space. It can be summed up in the words of the late Carl Sagan, who glumly intoned, “The Cosmos is all there is and all there ever will be.” He tried to put some hopeful English on this bleak equation by observing that we were made “of the same material as the stars,” as if being composed of the same elements as distant balls of burning gas could be a poetic consolation to us. Of course the word “stars” carries with it the connotation of magic and wish-fulfillment, but why trade on that when one is saying that there is nothing beyond the material world, and therefore such things as magic and miracles and wishes do not exist and should be abandoned? And if we are not more than aggregates of the elements on the periodic table, why should we want that poetic consolation? Isn’t playing to that desire a contradiction of the main point? Is Dr. Sagan trying to have it both ways and therefore hedging his bet? Or is he simply catering to a television audience by fudging the paralyzing bleakness of what he is saying?
If someone insisting on that strictly materialistic worldview encounters a miracle, or something purporting to be such a thing, he must, by definition, deny that it can be a true miracle. If he insists that the only “evidence” of a miracle he could ever accept must be “naturalistic” evidence, then there obviously can never be any such evidence. It is a tautology, a self-defeating koan, along the lines of “Could God make a rock so big that even he couldn’t move it?” Can one take it seriously?
The second part of this book contains a host of stories that are, if not some kind of evidence for miracles, then what? What does the reader make of them? Are they honestly believed hallucinations? Mere coincidences? Are they lies? Or might they really be miracles?
The stories in this book represent the tiniest fraction of all such stories. For a more academic treatment of the topic of miracles, and for many more accounts than we have here, one should look through Craig S. Keener’s magisterial, authoritative, and extremely thorough two-volume work, Miracles. Anyone wanting a scholarly 1,200-page and definitive rebuttal of Mr. Sagan’s aphorism could start there.
So imagine that there was compelling evidence—some might even say proof—that a supreme being was trying to communicate with humans. Imagine that such evidence was abundant but essentially ignored or dismissed by the news media and by the academic institutions of the Western world. Would that constitute a conspiracy? Some would say that it would. The author of this book would not. But wouldn’t it be scandalous nonetheless? If you’re wondering where that evidence is, this book means to present some of it for the reader’s consideration.
Whether one believes in miracles or the miraculous has mostly to do with the presuppositions one brings to the subject. What presuppositions do we have in asking whether there might be something beyond the natural world? All of us have presuppositions about the nature of things, about whether something can be beyond what we experience with our five senses. Sometimes our presuppositions are the result of our education, but they are just as often determined by, or at least partly the result of, our upbringing and the culture in which we were raised.
When I was growing up, no one I knew talked about miracles much, if at all. The church we went to every Sunday in New York City—in Corona, Queens—was not a place where priests discussed miracles. Miracles were something that happened a long time ago, if they ever had really happened. But if they had happened back then, why they didn’t still happen was not something anyone ever questioned or spoke about either. It was just a sort of sad truth that everyone acknowledged in how they behaved, in how they didn’t talk about the possibilities of miracles. Our not talking about it was part of the larger sadness, but that sadness was just part of the way things were, as far as we all knew.
I remember being in Sunday school class at age five or six and coloring a scene from the Bible. I don’t remember the specifics of it, but I think it pictured a bearded patriarch and an angel. I do remember longing for what people had in those remote, long-ago days: a real connection with God and angels, with the world of miracles and magic. What was keeping us fro
m having that too? I had no idea, but I felt that something inside me was made for that connection with the world beyond this one, for a connection with something more real and more true and more alive than anything I was experiencing or being told about in church. I knew that if I so longed for that world, there must be a reason I longed for it. Why would I long for something that didn’t exist? Where did that longing come from? It was such a deep and innate longing that it seemed to come from a place more real and true and alive than the place I was currently living in, as though my longing was part of my true nature, before it had become broken off, as though it was a vestige of who I really was and would be again someday. It was as though I was a prince exiled from another kingdom and whenever I saw hints of that other kingdom, I hoped to find the way back.
Some people would say that this longing is just a vestige of childhood and nothing else. It is what makes us long for Santa Claus, but then we grow up and move into the world of reality and see those things for what they are. We face the grim reality of being alone in the universe, a universe with no meaning, and we must finally grow up and bravely face that universe and that lack of meaning. We must face the fact that this world of matter—of atoms and molecules and things we could detect with our five senses—is all there is and all there ever was or ever will be. We must come to terms with the idea that our lives only have the meaning that we give them, that our desire for meaning itself is meaningless. But who can bear such thoughts? Unless they are true. And if they are true, what is truth? Can there be such a thing as truth if the world is devoid of meaning?
What is it in us that rebels against this lie of life without meaning—and not only a lie but a monstrous lie that stands against everything we somehow know to be true and good and beautiful? Why do we sometimes feel that we are exiles from someplace glorious? What is this innate feeling that we have shared across cultures, centuries, and continents? We can spend our lives denying it, but our very bones and atoms cry out that this denial of meaning is a lie, that everything in us not only longs for that other world and for meaning, but also needs that other world and needs meaning more than food or water or air. It is what we were made for and we will not rest until we find it again.