The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, Montreal, proposed a daring theme for Lenten chapel services: questions often asked but seldom answered in church. One rearranged this wanderer’s worldview, like a kaleidoscope’s shifting pattern. “Why don’t miracles happen anymore?”
The Rev. Richard Topping adjusted the question. “Why don’t we want miracles to happen anymore?” He touched upon one outcome of our Age of Reason. “Talk about God and God’s interventions and intrusions in our lives is now superfluous. Science can explain everything that happens, and where it can’t yet it will some day.” He paused a moment. “Sure sounds like faith to me.”
Miracles don’t happen anymore because we can’t, or won’t, see them.
Later, I saw an elderly lady I had nodded to for years without knowing her name slowly making her way through the snowdrifts and offered her a lift. In the five-minute ride, I learned that she moved to Canada after WWII, her father’s printing plant closed by the Nazis because he published a magazine edited by a Jew. She had become a curator and university lecturer. Charmed, as I slowed at her destination, I ventured “Maybe miracles really do happen.”
“Of course, they happen!” she exclaimed in her still-strong accent. “My entire life has been tick-tick-tick, one miracle after another.” I drove away grateful for a small miracle.
The second miracle was that I could actually see to drive through the tears in my eyes.
Over the years we worried about a daughter who suffered terrifying psychotic episodes. In moments at church and elsewhere, I asked God without much conviction for the wisdom and courage to help her heal. And she has healed—a miracle, I think. She has met a gentle and loving man, has a job she enjoys, and found quiet happiness in a small town a day’s drive away. I worried some more that, in a setting where they knew no one, they might just isolate themselves in their little apartment. I called her that night to tell of my wonderful day.
“Can you call me back on Saturday, Dad?” she asked over the laughter in the background. “We’re eating hamburgers with some friends and going to a sports bar to watch the hockey game.” Miracle number three.
The warm glow had disappeared in a day or two, but an elusive sense teased in stray moments. Was I searching for God? Or was He patiently waiting for me to get with the program?
God found me one evening trudging through the snow at the end of another day at a local radio station, a semi-retired codger filling in during a young guy’s vacation.
Radio! Little vibrations from my larynx transformed by a microphone into electrical pulses in a wire, modulated on a carrier wave and beamed into the atmosphere to be captured as sound waves from a speaker in some guy’s car.
What geniuses they were! Edison, Bell, Marconi and all the rest who built the foundations which have morphed into HDTV, the internet, cell phones and all the other toys of the early 21st century.
But wait. Was God gently nudging me to turn the kaleidoscope? Sound waves existed before the first wave lapped on a prehistoric beach. The first tree crashed in a forest whether any one was there to hear it or not. Electrical energy, created in the instant of Creation, flashed in the first lightning and startled ol’ Ben Franklin on a rainy Maryland night.
All this existed before Man, created at the very birth of the universe. Science stumbled awkwardly across it, unsure of what it had discovered. All those invisible radio waves that engulf us are no testimony to our human brilliance but to God’s miracles that surround us.
Maybe if we can hold that thought, we’ll be less likely to broadcast so much crap.
