This article was published by Gilbert! Magazine
Why and Why Not
By Dwight Longenecker
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the
solutions of man.
- G.K.Chesterton
My friend Steven entertains
and mystifies me because he is at once a devout Catholic and a devout
doubter. He has no time for the more entertaining aspects of the
Catholic religion like visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, stigmatics,
the uncorrupted bodies of saints and relics of the True Cross. Steve
turns up his nose at such miraculous phenomena yet he blithely says
the creed at Mass each week in which he professes to believe in the
incarnation, the Virgin Birth and the resurrection of the dead.
Surely if he believes God
himself was born of a Virgin in Palestine two thousand years ago,
was killed as a political threat and rose again on the third day;
he should have no problem with weeping Madonnas, saints’ corpses
that smell of roses, levitating nuns or monks with healing powers.
But if I challenge him on the matter Steven says in a cryptic whisper, ‘I
don’t believe Christianity is dependent on the miraculous.’
I must admit that logic is
on his side. Steven asks me why almighty God should be concerned
to make a Madonna in Italy weep real tears but he doesn’t intervene
to stop tens of thousands of Africans killing one another in Rwanda.
He asks why the Blessed Virgin Mary appears to tell Bosnian youngsters
to pray, but doesn’t tell Bosnian soldiers not to rape, pillage and
kill. Why, he wonders, does God make an image of Mother Teresa appear
inside a bagel in Texas, but he doesn’t divert two airliners from
the World Trade Centre? If these miracles are from God, doesn’t this
make it seem that God is busy doing conjuring tricks while the world
burns? This makes Nero’s fiddling seem high brow. Suddenly I’m stuttering.
But maybe the miracles have
very little to do with our sort of logic. Maybe they are simply a
part of God’s wonderfully quirky creation of the cosmos. Perhaps
miracles are practical jokes that are built into the system like
those old fashioned pictures where you have to find the hidden faces.
Once you saw the hidden face you saw the whole picture differently.
Maybe miracles are the hidden faces which help us see the whole cosmos
differently. They remind us that the wall between this world and
the next has cracks in it, and that’s how the light gets in.
Steven’s argument still persists.
Why does God do weird and wonderful miracles but doesn’t do great
and glorious ones? But who’s to say that a million great and glorious
miracles are not occurring every day? How many planes are borne up
on angels’ wings and prevented from crashing? How many cars are steered
back onto the road by an unseen hand? How many dying children are
suddenly revived by the touch of God? How many evil men are turned
back from the demonic plans at the last moment? We will never know
how much evil has miraculously been prevented because of prayer.
We will never know about these preventative miracles because the
terrible things never happened.
To be too logical about it
all is not only dull it is small. Right judgements can only be made
by the one who has all the facts, and the only one who has all the
facts is the Almighty. In the overall plan of things it could be
that the little miracles are actually the most effective. Beneath
and through it all there runs a far deeper magic and a far more profound
logic. Within the whole drama, who knows what may come from one small
miracle? After all, it may well have been said, ‘Why did the Blessed
Mother bother to appear to that illiterate peasant girl at Lourdes?’ Yet
from that event millions have been blessed and healed and brought
into the kingdom. Looking further back it might have been said by
Abraham, ‘Why on earth did God tell me to sacrifice Isaac only to
pull that goat out of his hat at the last minute? What on earth did
that mean?’ Yet by his obedience the hint that God’s own son would
ascend the hill of sacrifice was kept alive. Likewise one week after
the crucifixion a cynic might well have scoffed and asked, ‘Why
did the Almighty bother to perform that conjuring trick with bones
and resurrect that poor deluded wandering preacher from Galilee?
What was that supposed to mean?’
