Why Don't We See More Miracles?

Perhaps sometimes as we hear of Christ giving sight to the blind, healing the lepers, and even raising the dead, we wonder why He rarely works such miracles today.  More often, though, we merely accept that miracles are a thing of the past and not of the present.  By our own lack of faith we confirm their absence from our lives.

Take a moment to ask yourself this question: do you really want to see miracles in your life?

It might seem easy to answer yes right away, but if so then I would dare to say that it may arise from a failure to understand the demands that a miracle makes upon you.  For a miracle requires metanoia—conversion of mind—conversion of heart.

In a talk my friend Josh gave a while back, he spoke directly to this reality: "Miracles happen when God tells us what to do and we do it."

If we deeply examine our own hearts and minds we may find the opposite reality existing: we want to tell God what to do and have Him do it.  That is the miracle we hope for.  We want to see the sufferings in our lives—or in the lives of those we love—removed.  We want to rejoice in the glory of the healing power of the Divine Physician right now.  We want to be restored to the fullness of life that we may live more abundantly as has been promised.  We want to be fully alive because we feel so far from it.

Yet those good desires leading us to Christ often drag along with them a reluctance to give up whatever is keeping us from union with Him.  We end up clinging to patterns that prevent us from receiving the grace He wishes to give us.  Merciful God that He is, He allows that.  He never takes away the suffering we see as evil when it saves us from worse evil or gives us a crutch to rely upon in our own brokenness that we are not yet ready to give up.

Moving out of that brokenness means letting go of our own victimhood.  However, as my friend Joseph reminded me recently, so few are willing to do that.  Whether we realize it or not, we often like to see ourselves as the injured party.  It's a safe place to be.  For who can fault the victim?

Instinctively we know that if we remain as victims before the face of a cruel world we can't blame ourselves for our fate.  Where we have failed again and again, we can become martyrs of circumstance  and therefore save ourselves from the heavy burden of guilt.  When everything seems against us and we want to hide in our beds, we can assure ourselves that after all it isn't our fault and that if God had wanted us to do more He could have made it possible.

It is far harder to embrace all the failures and sufferings as part of our reality without accepting also the crushing condemnation that certainly is not of God.  For to do so means to stand vulnerable as Christ did before Pilate—silent and without defense.

Yet think of what Christ said finally in answer to Pilate's questioning:

"You would have no power over me if it were not given you from above."

Nothing has power over us except by the will of our Heavenly Father.  Nothing can harm us against His most loving will.

Yet just as Job wrestled with his sufferings, as everything he held dear was taken away from him, we too wrestle with our own pain, the worst of which may be our own failure to live up to our own expectations of ourselves or seeing how our brokenness hurts those we love.  In that darkness and confusion, we can rebel against our situation without yet being willing to open ourselves to God's love.  We can fall into self-hatred and despondency, forgetting that the Creator of the Universe rules our lives.

Why should we not see miracles?  Why not expect God to transform our lives radically even where we struggle most?

The only reason I can see is because we go to Him with outlined expectations, limiting Him to the finite box we have prepared for His working, instead of going to Him with open hands and open hearts.  What might happen if we began to listen?  Would we hear God's voice if we let our inner selves fall silent in adoration before Him?

"Miracles happen when God tells us what to do and we do it."

The Tenth of February

The Web of Life

For Grandma

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat ei.
Requiescat in pace.
Amen.

How swiftly death strikes silent

The certitude of tomorrow

For her, for you, for us all

Who strive with grasping hands to hold

What life gives freely, to store

Treasured gains that never last.

Swiftly death uproots the heart

From soil of expectation, melts

Blinding judgment's bonds.  The seeds

We sow we may never reap; flawed

Words may seem to do more ill

Than good. Yet Love shines through the mask.

Swiftly death shadows our days,

Divorcing heart from hope that claims

Neat-tied perfect denouement.

The unfinished must go beyond

The grave, her untied strands weave

Into the web that you and I still spin.

A Day Reflecting a Lifetime: Wisdom from the End of the Third Decade

As I lifted my canoe to my shoulder and walked with it down to the lake, I had no thought of finding spiritual reflection.  I wanted simply to enjoy time spent in nature as a way to celebrate reaching the completion of three decades in this mortal coil.  Yet somehow that connection back to creation could not help but stir the soul toward connection with the Creator and that connection must needs shed light upon our wandering journey upon this earth.

Dipping my paddle in the lake first on one side of the canoe and then the other, I made my wending way across its surface, not knowing where I would end up or how long I could go on while the sun beat hot upon me.  I could have grown discouraged at my lack of progress as I struggled on, watching kayaks pass me with bows straight while my canoe's bow turned back and forth, floundering about a bit like a dying fish.  The delightful thing about a piece of plastic folded into a canoe—I call it my origami canoe—is its lightness, but of course that very lightness means it takes little to send it back and forth from side to side as if it had no clear sense of direction.  Each stroke of my paddle as I knelt in its center moved me as much to right or left as it did forward.  Every wave, no mater how small, and every breath of wind pushed me about in some direction or other.

Instead of growing discouraged as I do when things go awry in the minutiae of daily life I found my mind turned to reflection.  My journey across the lake became an analogy for life.

I tend to think that one ought to set one's sight on a goal and head directly toward it without turning to one side or the other, pursuing one's vocation and life purpose with unfailing success.  Yet somehow the path across the years seems rather to wend back and forth across the waters of life.

Alone in the canoe I could not keep a straight course.  It would have been easier with a companion, for we would have balanced each other's paddle strokes, working in unison toward that goal.  A companion too would have broken the silence that hung about me and seemed to wrap me about in a strange sort of contemplation.

It was not the doing that mattered even though the working of my muscles to send the canoe skimming across the waters gave me a feeling of strength, of belonging, of doing what I was created to do.  It was being that mattered more.  Instead of needing, seeking, striving, and a hundred other verbs describing our efforts to take control, I was responding gently to what came to me, breathing in the fresh air, as free as the proverbial child.

Why do we not live so?  Why do we fret and worry ourselves into illness or misery on account of the littlest things?

Sometimes I wonder whether this lack of peace and the rampant anxiety and depression in our society comes solely from this frenzied life that we live in this modern world we like to consider progressive and advanced and enlightened.  Have we achieved these seemingly-good adjectives only at the expense of our inner peace?  Perhaps even at the expense of contemplation?

Then I must wonder how much we would give up to regain that peace. Would we surrender all that we hold dear in order to cross the void of emptiness into that great work of the soul that is God's gift of contemplation?

Perhaps then we might forget our faltering footsteps and breathe in unison with a deeper force: the breath that stirred the waters at creation.

Veni Sancte Spiritus!

Missionary of Divine Providence

Somehow I find myself speaking more and more boldly and freely of late about abandoning oneself to Divine Providence and, as I do so, I find my own belief in it strengthened.  It is like a gift that I have the more I give it to others.  I find myself compelled from within to become a missionary of abandonment to Divine Providence.

It seems fitting to write of this idea today upon the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker, for he was ever abandoned to the Providence of God throughout his life.  In his work, in his silence, in his love, in his tender care for the Blessed Virgin Mary and for Christ, and in his humility, we see a tremendous example of one committed to living for the Lord.  He did not question, he did not shirk his duties, he did not flee from suffering.  Instead, he gave himself wholly to God's will in ways that we may never know upon this earth.

Saint Joseph seems to keep presenting himself in little ways in my life.  Some months ago now, I was blessed to visit the miraculous staircase he built at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I think of that experience now as I lift up my life to him, asking his intercession, that he may build of my life also something miraculous as a gift for my Lord and for the world.

He is a powerful spiritual father.  I look up to him as I continue my earthly pilgrimage and speak—I hope—by both words and actions of abandonment to Divine Providence.  I pray that you may do the same.

May it ever be for His glory and not our own!

Live in Abundance

​Yesterday, as I mentioned in a letter how I wished I could make a holy hour before the Blessed Sacrament more often, a phrase sprang to my mind that I had forgotten: the Sacrament of the Present Moment. I believe this phrase originated with de Caussade. One might also say merely the duty of the present moment, but that would be to forget about the incarnational presence of Christ in each moment.

For Christ comes to us not just in the Eucharist, not just in the Scriptures, not just in exceptional signs and visions, but in each and every moment and in all that happens to us. After all, He is everywhere and in everything.  We often speak those concepts intellectually without understanding with our hearts how He is constantly pouring Himself out for us, as is the nature of love.  Yet that is the reality.  I daresay we would die if we could truly see Him fully in each moment, for none can see the face of God and live.

It is that awareness of the Sacrament of the Present Moment that keeps us present to things and people around us.  It sets us free to live fully each moment. I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly, said Christ.  (John 10:10.)

Saint Joseph must have lived most faithfully in that vein, for he responded so promptly to the workings of grace and the Holy Spirit.  Although so much of his life was hidden and shrouded in silence, that hiddenness and silence speak strongly of a life lived in adoration of the Sacrament of the Present Moment.

How much peace Joseph must have found in adoring the Omnipotent God in the smallest of circumstances.  It is no wonder then that he should have been chosen to serve as the foster-father of the Incarnate God and as the husband of the one who uttered her absolute fiat to the will of God in all circumstances, who certainly saw with the eyes of faith her Lord in every twist and turn of her earthly pilgrimage.

Silence

The other day a dear friend of mine spoke of serving at a feast day Mass with a description so profound and yet so simple: "There was such a silence."

Silence.

The word rings out so beautifully and so fruitfully.  Yet how many people go to prayer and say they feel nothing or hear nothing and grow discouraged when they do not see the miracles in their lives that they desire?  Or perhaps the question is rather how many of us do not?

Often we find in prayer only silence, at least when we quit talking long enough to listen.  It is a powerful silence—a silence full of awe and even fearsome to us.

In my journey, I am learning more and more how powerful is that silence.  It is not the silence of a manmade idol that cannot heed our prayers, but rather the silence of a Being so great that our senses cannot fathom His greatness, so wise that our minds cannot understand His wisdom, and so loving that our hearts cannot contain His love.

He could work miracles so amazing that we would fall down in awe before them.  Yet how often are we distracted by the miracles and forget the miracle-worker?

Instead of miracles, He comes in silence.  He humbles Himself to become powerless in the depths of our hearts that we might open the door and accept Him into our lives.  Only once we have learned to find Him in the silence and seeming-emptiness does He reveal Himself.