Photo by Lester Lefkowitz/Corbis
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The Mystery of Miracles
BY Bill Newcott, January & February 2009
For the overwhelming majority of Americans 50-plus, extraordinary feats by the hand of God are not just a matter of faith…they’re a matter of fact
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Harry Rubenstein is cradling the small, red, leather-bound book in his hands as if it were a baby bird. He lets it fall open, and the back room at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is suddenly filled with the wafting aroma of old yellowed pages.
What he holds is Thomas Jefferson’s 1820 Bible, though a closer look reveals this to be no ordinary Bible. The author of the Declaration of Independence had used a razor to meticulously excise favored passages from a pair of King James Bibles and pasted them onto blank, bound pages. Left behind: every miracle, every hint of the divinity of Jesus. So Jefferson’s New Testament has no loaves and fishes, no walking on water, no water into wine, no Resurrection. Jefferson dismissed such passages as superstition. What he wanted was something more straightforward, as reflected in the title he gave the work: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.
“This project was purely of the Enlightenment: rewrite the Bible,” says Rubenstein, head of the museum’s division of politics and reform. Jefferson’s experiment ran squarely against the grain of American culture, adds Barbara Clark Smith, a Smithsonian expert in 18th-century America. “He was attacked,” she says. “People wrote he was an infidel.”
To this day, there are those who stand aghast at Jefferson’s chutzpah, and that raises a fair question: Does faith exist without miracles? Are there miracles at all, and if not, just how do we explain those events that inevitably become defined as such?
Nearly 200 years after Jefferson, we decided to find out who’s winning that intellectual tug of war. In an AARP The Magazine survey, we asked 1,300 people 45 and over what they thought about miracles, and the results were striking: fully 80 percent said they believe in them, 41 percent said they happen every day—and 37 percent said they have actually witnessed one.
Intriguingly, though, the older you are, the less likely you are to believe in miracles.
The rich and highly schooled “are the masters of the universe. They don’t need anybody.”
In setting out to understand how Americans feel about miracles, we first had to come up with a definition for the word—because, frankly, miracle seems to get tossed around an awful lot. Some may quibble, but for our purposes the Mets’ winning the 1969 World Series is not a miracle. Neither is hitting 24 Black on a roulette wheel. Rather, we chose to raise the bar and define a miracle as “an incredible event that cannot be scientifically explained.”
Then we went in search: Why do skeptical, modern Americans still believe in them?
Dennis Finch, 63, of Kuna, Idaho, says it’s simple: he himself experienced one. “A few years ago I was in the hospital, in a coma,” he recalls. “I stopped breathing several times, and the doctors told all my relatives they’d better get to the hospital to say their goodbyes. But people were praying for me. I remember, in my coma, seeing my brother David and my brother-in-law Roy—who had both passed on—and I was really upset because they wouldn’t talk to me.
“Well, it turned out they wouldn’t talk to me because it wasn’t my time. I lived. The doctors still don’t know what was wrong with me, and they also don’t know why I survived. One doctor calls me his miracle child.”
Among poll respondents we spoke with in depth, Finch’s miracle story is the most typical: a hopeless illness, a desperate prayer, an inexplicable recovery. Strictly speaking, perhaps, these stories may not fit into our narrow definition of a miracle because, after all, most medical ailments have been found to be at least occasionally treatable. But those who report such cases as miracles feel there is an extra ingredient present—a “spiritual something”—and their conviction is as certain as the fact that they are alive today.
Consider the survey results: of those who believe in miracles, 84 percent say they happen because of God. About three quarters further identify Jesus and the Holy Spirit as sources of miracles, while lesser numbers attribute them to angels (47 percent), saints (32 percent), deceased relatives or others who have passed on (19 percent), and other spirits (18 percent).
So what’s going on? Wouldn’t the Creator of the universe have better things to tend to than pulling off the occasional miracle? It depends, of course, on whom you ask.
To a scientist, events that many would consider miracles are not only explainable, they’re inevitable—because in a universe of nearly infinite possibilities, outrageously unexpected things have to happen at least occasionally.
“The Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials,” says Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things (W.H. Freeman, revised, 2002). “Events with a million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.”
Although that may explain why such extraordinary things as “miracles” happen, it is the province of believers to try to put these events into the context of their belief systems. “I think that through miracles we step back and we start reevaluating our place in the universe,” says Patsy Clairmont, a Christian speaker and author of All Cracked Up: Experiencing God in the Broken Places (Thomas Nelson, 2006). “We see something miraculous and ask ourselves, ‘What is this? I can’t explain it. Is there truly something more than me?’”
Father Jonathan Morris, a Fox News commentator and the author of The Promise: God’s Purpose and Plan for When Life Hurts (HarperOne, 2008), agrees that for believers, miracles reveal as much about the nature of God as they do about the beneficiary. “When people say, ‘This is a miracle,’ they’re not saying ‘God broke the laws of nature to give me this blessing,’” Morris notes. “They’re saying, ‘God cares about me so much that he allowed this to happen.’”
He’d get no argument from Donna Neugent, 64, of Ballwin, Missouri. “My husband and I had a five-year-old son, but we wanted another child and just couldn’t get pregnant,” says Neugent. “My husband and I prayed about it, but never together—until one night when we lay face-to-face on our bed, and we started praying.
“Then we got a strange feeling and sat up. There, floating in the doorway, was a figure the size of a three-year-old child. It stayed there for about 45 seconds and didn’t say anything. And then it was gone. My husband just said, ‘Before you do anything, tell me what you saw.’ We’d seen the same thing.
“Two weeks later we found out I was pregnant.”
Neugent terms her experience a miracle, though it’s also quite likely she and her husband continued to do the things that would under normal circumstances result in a baby. And that’s the healthiest way to approach the idea of miracles, according to Rabbi Harold Kushner, bestselling author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Schocken).
“It’s okay to pray for a miracle as long as you’re also working to deal with your problem, rather than leaving it all up to God,” he says. “A miracle is something unusual that happens when it need not have happened, and by happening, sustains people’s faith in God and the world.”
Although 29 percent of our poll respondents say they’ve witnessed divine healings, the types of miracles people experience can embrace everything from medical healing to a miraculously timed call from a loved one to economic deliverance. On his website The Burning Bush, Pastor Ed Wrather of the First Baptist Church of Sweetwater, Oklahoma, has collected stories of financial miracles reported by believers who’ve found themselves in economic crisis.
In one account, a writer tells of having a crushing debt due by a particular date, with no possible way to pay it. Four days before the deadline, he writes, a pastor from his church arrived at his door—with a check for the exact amount. “No one, not even my wife, knew how much we had to have,” he writes. “My pastor said that someone came to him and told him that the Lord had laid a burden on his heart to give this money to me. He didn’t know my name but described me to him.
“Well, I broke down and started to cry, and it is not a pretty sight to see a 300-pound, tattooed hippie biker, now saved by the blood of Christ, crying like a little kid.”
Judging from the responses to our poll, that Judeo-Christian concept of miracles—a personal God reaching into space and time to work remarkable acts—overwhelmingly dominates the American spiritual landscape. Virtually absent is a view held by 800 million people worldwide: the Hindu belief that miracles come from a far less definable source. I put the question of miracles to guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, one of India’s leading spiritual figures—and whose U.S. following is growing—at the Washington, D.C., office of his Art of Living Foundation.
In white robes and with a flowing, graying beard, he sat with his back to a window overlooking Meridian Hill Park one rainy afternoon. “Nature has many unpredictable instances happen, and we see the whole of nature as one living, very lively organism,” he said. “And in that sense, a miracle is a part of nature. It is the small mind connecting with the larger mind. You call it God; I call it universal energy. Many healings happen. Every day I hear of some.”
Foreign as the Hindu concept of miraculous energy is to most Americans, there may be a grain of it present in the Western belief in sacred places.
I am standing in one of the world’s largest plazas, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal. Across the length of the square I can pick out small knots of the faithful, inching along a well-worn path, each group encircling and encouraging a believer crawling or walking on his or her knees, thanking the Virgin for a favor or asking one. Here in the blazing Portuguese sun the believers are working their way toward an open-air chapel where, in a glass case, stands the Virgin’s statue. In her crown dangles a lump of lead—what’s left of a bullet that tore through Pope John Paul II in a 1981 assassination attempt. Although he stopped short of calling it a miracle, John Paul credited his survival to Our Lady of Fatima.
Europe is dotted with sacred sites like Fatima—the United States, less so. Still, in our poll 38 percent say they would travel to such a place if they had the chance. And 6 percent have actually made the trip, among them Cary Canli, 54, of Troy, New York.
“I was a nonbeliever until I went to Lourdes,” says Canli. “But I saw frail and fragile people walk out of there perfectly fine.”
The whole idea of traveling long distances or enduring physical discomfort to earn a miracle raises a fair question: What are the criteria for receiving one?
Nearly 75 percent of those who believe say that the people most worthy of miracles are those who have faith, and 67 percent say prayer is important. But 55 percent also say that “desire and conviction” that a miracle will happen plays a role. Miracle beneficiaries are “good, decent” people, according to 44 percent of respondents, and 33 percent agree that those who receive miracles have “the greatest need,” while 35 percent say they “have faced enough trials in life already.”
Only 9 percent say those who receive miracles have done nothing to deserve them. Falling into that category might be a respondent from Altoona, Pennsylvania, who told us he has survived five head-on car collisions—one of them while driving a stolen car—and walked away from them all. “I wondered, ‘How could I have survived this?’” he says. “It’s a miracle.”
Presumably, miracles should be pretty evenly distributed demographically—but there seem to be people in certain social strata who are either not getting their share or are simply missing out on the miracles around them. Seventy-one percent of those with a college or postcollege degree are believers, for example, compared with 85 percent of those with a high-school degree. And the more money you make, the less likely you are to believe in miracles: 78 percent of those making $75,000 or more believe; 86 percent of those making $25,000 or less do.
That doesn’t surprise the Reverend Forrest Church, whose Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City is in the heart of one of the wealthiest, most educated areas in the United States. The rich and the highly schooled “are the masters of the universe,” he says, laughing. “They don’t need anybody.”
Adds Kushner: “People who need miracles believe in them more, and people who are doing fine without them are more skeptical.”
Women, who Morris says tend to be “especially spiritually sensitive,” are more likely to believe in miracles: 85 percent of them do, compared with just 73 percent of men. Most intriguingly, older folks are less inclined to believe: 85 percent of those ages 45 through 54 believe in miracles, compared with 78 percent of those 55 through 64, and 75 percent of those 65 and up.
“I think one reason that, as people get older, they get a little more doubtful is that they end up tempered by the wisdom of their own mortality,” says Church. “They become more honest with themselves that nothing is going to save them from death.”
There’s also no ignoring the sizable 18 percent of people who simply reject the whole notion of miracles. I caught up with one of the country’s most celebrated skeptics, Penn Jillette, at his Las Vegas, Nevada, office. Half of the legendary magic team Penn and Teller, he has made a second career debunking reports of supernatural phenomena.
“Once you say something is a miracle, what you’re saying is ‘I understand every physical and mathematical property in the world, and this is outside of it,’” he says. “It’s saying ‘I know everything, and this can’t be explained by anything.’ So there’s a tremendous amount of hubris in the closed-mindedness of accepting a miracle.”
So, when the world sees a miracle, what’s really happening?
“Evolution has conditioned us to keep alert for the rustling of the leaves,” says Scientific American’s Shermer. “We’re always on the lookout for the outliers, for what’s different.”
“The answer that I love,” says Jillette, “the answer that I embrace, and that shows what a big and beautiful place the universe is: ‘I don’t know.’”
Forrest Church could count himself among those who’ve been touched by a miracle. In his latest book, Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow (Beacon, 2008), he tells how two years ago he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and given six months to live. He’s still here—and preaching, despite the removal of his esophagus. But he insists that life’s perceived miraculous events come only within the context of a larger miracle.
“I believe in the super and the natural, and not the supernatural,” he says. “Life is a miraculous gift. We tend to take life for granted, seeing it as normative rather than as miraculous. And then something magnificent happens, and we credit it to a miracle. The truth is, we don’t need to expect a miracle to experience the miraculous.”
If believers like to say “Miracles happen every day,” they must also account for the corollary statement, “Miracles don’t happen every day,” says Christian speaker Clairmont.
“My brother was on life support,” she recalls. “He was 38 and had six children. I knew those children needed their daddy. So we wanted a miracle. But we did not get one. When they took him off life support, he was gone.”
Yet only in a universe where miracles are possible, she says, can the absence of a miracle become a life-affirming event. “When you don’t get a miracle—as when you do—it is a startling moment of deciding again where you stand in the universe,” Clairmont says. “You have to say, ‘Lord, what does this mean about the two of us?’”
Thomas Jefferson probably wouldn’t understand. The reason most of us keep looking for miracles, even in the face of skepticism, is most likely floating somewhere in the neat rectangular gaps of his cut-and-paste Bible.
Additional reporting by Marilyn Milloy and Alissa Ponchione.
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