Weekly Soul, Week 1 - Everything is a miracle.
Today's meditation from Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living by Dr. Frederic Craigie.
-1-
There are only two
ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as
though everything is.
Albert Einstein/Gilbert Fowler
White
A young woman hobbles to the shrine at
Lourdes, throws away her crutches, and walks. A middle-aged man is diagnosed
with inoperable liver cancer and six months later, it’s gone. A 5-month-old
baby is discovered alive in the rubble of an earthquake in Nepal, having
survived against all odds for nearly a day. Nineteen golfers in Colorado suffer
a direct lightning strike and live.
In our culture, we think about miracles in
events like these; potentially-dire situations that turn out in ways that far
exceed reasonable expectations or rational explanations. Sometimes, we embrace
them; sometimes, we are skeptical. Almost always, they are cause for
celebration.
But spiritually, the idea of miracles runs
deeper. Everything is a miracle.
Word origins are often revealing. Our
modern word miracle has its roots in the Latin miraculum/mirari/mirus; referring to an “object of wonder,” a
“marvel,” and inspiring “awe and admiration.” The Latin, in turn, has origins
in the earlier smeiros/sméyros, to
“smile or laugh.”
With this broader understanding, miracles
are not so much mysterious deviations from what we think is possible. Rather,
they are things that are all around us, that we hold in wonder and awe, and that
make us smile.
You cut your finger chopping kale. You clean it up and do the usual first aid care, and a week later, there is
absolutely no indication at all that anything happened to your finger.
Your infant daughter crawls one day and
joyfully takes halting steps the next. Your infant daughter grows up, and you
smile as you see her marry a person that she loves.
A letter travels across the country with
such accuracy that neither you nor anyone you know has ever experienced a
postal error. A military cargo plane with a takeoff weight of almost 175 tons
flies. Somehow, there is enough water for millions of people in Tucson and
Phoenix, the principal populated areas of the Sonoran Desert, where I live
seasonally. With scattered clouds on a summer day, the sunset lights up the sky
with vibrant shades of red and orange. You are alive, and you have the ability
to choose the kind of person you want to be as you live your life.
Are these not “objects of wonder?” Do they
(some of them—you might have your doubts about the postal service and you might
not think much about cargo planes) make you smile? Are they not miracles?
Reflection
- What difference might it make
for you if you were to view everything
as a miracle?
- What has there been in your
everyday life this week that has been “an object of wonder” and has made
you smile?
Author
Albert
Einstein (1879-1955)
was a world-renowned physicist who profoundly changed our understanding of time
and space. It is noteworthy for this particular reflection that four of his
seminal papers were produced in one year, 1905, which has been described as his
annus mirabilis (miracle year).
The provenance of this familiar quotation
is not clear. I find no direct record of Einstein having said it although he
did write often about the relationship of science and his spiritual views. He
did famously say, “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the
mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion
is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as
dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself
as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can
comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is
at the center of true religiousness.”
The “miracles” quotation was documented
(attributing it to Einstein) in the 1940s by Gilbert Fowler White (1911-2006). White was an American
geographer with special interests in flooding and water management. Active in
the Society of Friends, he was a conscientious objector in World War II,
working with refugees in France. He was also a distinguished academic, serving
for several years as president of Haverford College and teaching at the
University of Chicago and University of Colorado. His New York Times obituary
comments that his “philosophy of accommodating nature instead of trying to
master it had profound effects on policy and environmental thought.”
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