Touched by God–or just good luck?
Published: December 27, 2005
Call it fate, serendipity or just dumb luck. Some choose the word “miracle.”
That’s the only way that Vilma Vivas of Coney Island can fathom how six members of her family walked away from a fiery plane crash in the Amazon this summer, while dozens of others died.
Arsenio Matias of Wyandanch talks about being divinely blessed. How else to explain how both his hands were re-attached after they had been severed in a factory accident last winter.
Kim Polly-Palange of Bellport credits God, as well as a medical miracle, for the recovery of her 3-year-old son, whose skull was crushed after his father backed over him in a sport utility vehicle last February.
At a time when Christians and Jews celebrate holidays marking God’s circumvention of natural laws — for Christians, the birth of God in human form; for Jews, the miracle of a drop of sacred oil that burned for eight days — most Americans say they believe in miracles. And not just the ones described in the Bible. Many also credit God for the extraordinary recoveries, rescues and survival stories around them — no matter that skeptics see more worldly explanations.
“I would say that belief in miracles is part of mainstream America,” said author Dan Wakefield, who collected dozens of such stories for his 1995 book, “Expect a Miracle: The Miraculous Things That Happen to Ordinary People.” “But the definitions of a miracle vary widely — from an extraordinary event in the physical world that can’t be explained by the laws of science to the spontaneous remission of an illness to the belief that nearly all of life is miraculous.”
Polls show that more than 80 percent of Americans believe in a God who performs miracles. Almost half say that they themselves have received such blessings — only slightly more than those who believe that Satan performs “false” miracles, according to one survey by Princeton Survey Research Associates.
Analysts say that the fact that we live in an age of space shuttles and supercomputers has scant effect on how people comprehend the world.
Many see no contradiction between religion and science, regarding them as “nonoverlapping magisteria,” in the words of the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
Weighing the questions
But what is a miracle exactly? Was the improbable catch of the 5-week-old baby tossed out of a burning building in the Bronx earlier this month a miracle or just a lucky break? And if it is deemed a miracle, why was that child saved, while thousands of innocents perished in the earthquake in India and Pakistan?
Brad Hirschfield, an Orthodox rabbi, believes in a divine calculus that is incomprehensible to the human mind.
“You can’t simply invoke God when you get what you want,” said Hirschfield, who is vice president of the Manhattan-based National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. “If God saves the child who falls out of the window, that same God causes someone else’s child to die when they fall out of the window. Those two go together.”
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Hirschfield heard from survivors who believed they had been spared by God. “And I’d say to them, ‘That’s beautiful. But are you prepared now to walk into the home of a firefighter and explain to his family that God wanted him to die?’
Because unless you’re prepared to believe that it’s the hand of God in both circumstances, you shouldn’t go down the road at all.
Doubters argue there is no cosmic plan — only an impersonal universe animated by natural law.
“People survive an accident and say, ‘God spared us.’ Well, what about the other 136 people who died miserably and in flames?” said Joe Nickell, who debunks miracle claims as senior research fellow at the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, publisher of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. “It’s a selective use of data and is not only not scientific, it’s really anti-scientific. It’s superstition.”
Miracle stories are as old as history, of course, and form part of all the great faith traditions, from Moses’ parting of the Red Sea, to Jesus’ raising of the dead, to Mohammed’s receiving the word of God.
The Rev. A.R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, believes that God continues to intervene in the modern world. He tells how his own wife experienced a “miraculous” healing 30 years ago from an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit after a visit to a faith healer.
“I think that if they stop and think about it, most people have experienced miracles, by which I mean a moment of God’s grace in their lives. They let us know there’s someone greater than ourselves.”
Matters of interpretation
Nickell does not dispute that many people experience extraordinary things and that it is profoundly reassuring to think we are part of something larger.
“I myself have had such good things happen,” said the former magician and private detective. “But I also have tragic things that have happened. And honesty directs me to acknowledge that I can’t just count the good things that happen and say, those are miracles, and put aside the bad things as flukes.”
Try telling that, though, to someone whose survival defies all the odds.
Manitha Hegde, 32, of Briarwood, believes that her recovery from paralysis and speech loss after a major stroke this summer was nothing short of a miracle. And that was just the first blessing.
Had it not been for the stroke, she said, a brain aneurysm might never have been diagnosed. That diagnosis led to surgery in the nick of time.
“I don’t feel that what happened to me was just a lucky break,” said Hegde, who is Hindu. “Just by chance, I came to New York because my husband got a job here. There was no way I could have gotten this medical care in India. And if I had not suffered a massive stroke, there would have been no angiogram, and without the angiogram, nobody would have known about the aneurysm.
“I’m seeing my life in an entirely different way,” Hegde said. “Now, I feel that everything is in God’s plan.”
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: