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(OPINION) In 1995, I published a book called “Modern-Day Miracles: How Ordinary People Experience Supernatural Acts of God.” It’s been out of print for years, so don’t worry about buying a copy.
I am now, as I was then, a Pentecostal pastor in addition to being a journalist. As a Pentecostal, I already had a lot of experience with people who claimed to have been supernaturally healed or to have received some other form of divine intervention.
I thought that subject — reports of miracles — would make a great book, and my secular publishing house agreed, surprisingly. I set out to research everything I could find about supposed miracles. I read books and articles. I interviewed doctors, religion experts, skeptics — and, naturally, dozens of people who’d claimed they’d run smack dab into the hand of God.
It was a delightful project. I learned things I haven’t forgotten 30 years later.
One lesson was that these miracle reports weren’t confined to my brand of born-again, hands-laying-on, prophesying Holy Rollers, or even to Christians writ large.
All kinds of folks reported inexplicable, transformative wonders — Pentecostals, Baptists, Catholics, yes — but also Jews, Sufis and Hindus. Educated people. Primitive people. Sad old reprobates. Incongruously, a self-described atheist told me in detail how the God he still didn’t believe in had miraculously saved his life during the Six Day War in 1967.
The God of miracles seemed not to discriminate.
Another thing: People had been having these experiences for as long as there have been ways to record the stories. The Enlightenment and scientific advances hadn’t dented the frequency of reports much. It was as if the universe just eternally buzzed and popped and coursed with a kinetic power that enjoyed breaking into our constricted time and constipated presuppositions.
All this had approximately the effect on me of somebody drilling a circle out of my skull and dropping a hand grenade in. Getting my brains scrambled turned out to be a good thing.
Certainly, writing that book wasn’t the only thing that’s influenced my subsequent thinking. I’ve gotten older. I’ve suffered losses. I’ve received graces. Life has happened.
But here are three conclusions I’ve come to since “Modern-Day Miracles,” at least partly as a result of writing it:
1. There is a God
I already assumed that, obviously. I was a minister. But my thinking about what that means has shifted.
Do I doubt God’s existence? Sure. Sometimes daily. If you don’t have doubts, you’re probably not thinking very seriously. But, as Anne Lamott and others have observed, doubt isn’t the opposite of faith. Certainty is the opposite of faith.
I do have faith, and if anything it’s gotten deeper. I’ve talked to too many people over too many years, heard and read too many first-person accounts, experienced too much joy, witnessed too many life transformations, studied too much quantum physics, to arrive at another conclusion.
In my heart, God is a fact. In my head — I’m still working on that.
2. I’m not God
Neither are you. We both ought to be glad of that.
St. Augustine said that if you think you’ve grasped God, it isn’t God you’ve grasped.
Almost 50 years into my Christian journey, I remain a Pentecostal minister. I still buy all — OK, many — of the traditional things. I’m small “o” orthodox. It’s how I relate to the Almighty.
But it turns out God has the right not to conform to my theology. God often doesn’t conform to my theology. My paradigm has gotten shifted so many times I’ve lost count.
I no longer imagine my way of relating to God is the only correct way. The universe of things I don’t know is infinitely bigger than the teacup of things I do know. I’m perpetually playing catch-up. God can open the pearly gates to anybody he so chooses, without any input from me.
3. God loves us. All of us.
If you consider the hell-bent-for-certain planet we share, with its constant wars, rapes, pollution and greed, it’s hard to imagine the place was created by an all-powerful, benevolent God. If you’ve heard sermons from misguided preachers proclaiming that an angry God can’t wait to torture you in a fiery hell for 10 billion years, it’s hard to conclude that God is love.
Yet that’s what I’ve concluded: God is love. It’s why all those miracles happen — because God cares when we’re suffering. Even when the miracles don’t happen — which, mostly, they don’t — God is present with us in our suffering. Too many honest people have borne witness to that presence.
My own mystical epiphanies through the years have all involved my being overcome by a love beyond this realm, beyond my human means to describe it.
Why doesn’t this loving God just wave his God-wand and end the evil? I haven’t a clue. But I also no longer feel the need to know every answer. That’s why believers call it faith.