How Many of Us Believe that Miracles are Really Possible?

I can understand how it may be embarrassing to believe miracle stories, and so I appreciate why many choose to set them aside and “rescue” the message of the Gospel, the “values” of the Gospel, from its “primitive” views of nature. But when this is done, it turns out that there is nothing really left to rescue that’s worth too much. What is left is often a “message” that is no more than a sentimental moralistic inspiration, most of the time innocuous, other times dangerous, and always sounding somehow as a possibly pathological escape from reality. Instead, miracles testify to the possibility for the discovery of something really new, the possibility for something happening beyond what stifling circumstances permit, the possibility for a truly new beginning that sets us free from enslavement to the inevitable consequences of the past, the possibility for a mercy that rescues us from an impersonal justice and its relentless demands, the possibility for a change of heart, for seeing what was invisible before, the possibility to fulfill that desire, that desperate need, that suppressed hope, and bottled-up anguish expressed in the Gospel (cf. Mk 10:46-52) by the cry of the blind man Bartimaeus: “Have pity on me!” Again and again he cried out, louder and louder, as people sought to silence him, to stop him, rebuking him, rebuking his desire. But he continued–“Have pity on me!–until finally he came face to face with the One whom he simply had to see to tell Him the desire that summarized his life: “Master, I want to see!” Bartimaeus’ cry is the cry of the human heart. It is the cry, the need, the passion to see what we cannot see and yet cannot live without, to see the face of the Mystery upon which our very existence and destiny depend in every moment in our lives, to understand the meaning of the drama into which we have been thrust by existence, to make sense of the contradictions that beset us, of the suffering that so often paralyzes us, of the impotence to which we often seem to have been condemned. “I want to see” expresses what propels human creativity and sustains human enterprises, intellectual and scientific research, social organization, and all varieties of inter-personal relations. The cry of the heart–“I want to see!”–is presumably the reason great universities are so important as places where students can hear the different proposals about the meaning, value, and possibilities of life experienced by their teachers and other students. And yet, as in the Gospel story, obstacles are placed in the way: cultural obstacles, institutional obstacles, ideological obstacles. All seek to suppress the raising of the question about meaning, to suppress the desire to see by reducing the desires of the heart to what is considered reasonable according to a mentality that will not go, cannot go, beyond what is measurable, predictable–and therefore controllable, relegating all else to the realm of the irrational. When something happens that is shocking, that was not expected, that makes the question about the meaning and possibilities of life unavoidable, armies of experts are deployed to explain everything away: “There is nothing new. Everything can be explained. We are taking care of it.” But Bartimaeus wasn’t looking for explanations to help him accept his blindness, he was looking to be cured of it. He wasn’t looking for advice. He was begging for salvation. He was cured as a sign that his faith was justified, that, standing before Jesus, he was indeed standing before the human presence of the Mystery that could satisfy the desires of his heart. This is what the Gospels proclaim: that the man Jesus of Nazareth is the human face of the Mystery, and that the cry of the human heart, the desire to see, is the desire to see Him, a desire that is indeed possible to fulfill. This is what the miracle points to–not an explanation, not an inspirational message, but an event: the possibility of encountering Christ the Redeemer, of being face to face with Him. This is why we believe in miracles.