On miracles
Photo by Yunus Tuğ
Two days after my tenth birthday, my mom suffered a stroke. I remember the quaver in her voice as I lay on the floor playing video games in the living room and she came out from the dim hallway to the back of the house and asked, “Where’s Dad?” I said I didn’t know but that I thought maybe he had gone to the store. I remember that I hardly looked at her. She went back to her room, and the next thing I remember is my dad running through the house shouting to get in the car. My brother and I sat a long while in the emergency room in the golden glow of lamplight falling softly down the leaves of a creeping potted plant. Eventually an uncle came and collected us. We played with him and my aunt and their little daughters. In the afternoon Dad came to tell us what had happened. I remember standing as he bent toward us in the foyer of my aunt’s house, light falling through the crape myrtles outside and the cut glass of the door to dance along the floor at our feet as I asked if Mom was going to die, and I remember him saying, very slowly and steadily, that yes, she might die. I did not know that the doctors had said she almost certainly would die, and almost certainly that night. An auxiliary bishop came to give her last rites. She could not speak and wept in terror, unable to make her confession.
She did not die that night. She lay in various hospital beds, first in intensive care, and then, when the immediate danger seemed to have passed, in a room on the seventh floor. The blinds in her room were always drawn, but there was a high window at the end of the hall where I stood for long intervals, my face pressed to the glass, looking down on the familiar world made strange. The right side of Mom’s body was paralyzed and, for all the doctors knew, would be so for a very long time, possibly forever. She would probably never drive again. She would probably not walk again. She would never play the piano again. This last hurt most. One day, as my mom’s family came home from Mass, she, two years old at the time, toddled over to the piano and played a hymn they had just heard. It’s a gift that formed much of the background of my childhood, my mom’s ability to play any song she’s ever heard, not simply to figure it out by messing about on the keyboard, but simply to play it, clear and entire. And now that gift was gone.
A classmate’s mother had had a stroke several years before. She was what I knew of strokes, a woman kind and ebullient, president of the Parent’s Club, whom I only knew now seated in a wheelchair, still trying to smile at me as I passed through her dim kitchen to play. If the soul and body are made for one another there is yet this strange fracture in our nature, the capacity of the soul to endure beyond the body’s mortality despite its constant implication in the same, a fracture I had seen in Mrs. Lazo and one I now anticipated as enduring in my mother for whatever time remained.
I remember the pain of watching her try to speak in those days, the pitiable spectacle of her repeating phrases in the manner of small children. “Mom, say Mississippi River Bridge.” “Miss-is-sip-pi Ri-ver Bridge.”
Alongside the pity and the terror, though, I was taken up by a strange joy. The everyday vanished. Each day was a new creation, each person a new wonder, each breath a miracle.
And after two weeks in the hospital, our pastor, Fr. Tom Stahel, brought my mom a relic. It had once belonged to another Jesuit priest, Fr. Harry Thomson, who married my parents, who baptized me and, holding me aloft before a statue of Our Lady, dedicated me to her, who gave me my first Holy Communion, and who had died a few years prior to that summer. The relic was a bit of the bone of Fr. Francis Xavier Seelos, a German Redemptorist priest who had served the people of New Orleans for one year during a yellow fever epidemic, eventually succumbing to the disease himself. He was known as the cheerful ascetic, a man who slept on a hard cot by the door of his rectory so that none of his brother priests need be awakened by the calls of the dying in the night. He was an extraordinary confessor. The line to his box would wrap around St. Mary’s Assumption Church down in the Irish Channel. And now a bit of his bone in a silver reliquary lay beside my mother’s bed.
My dad brought a chain to the hospital and hung the relic on Mom’s neck. The next morning, as she watched Mass on television, she tried to make the sign of the cross. It worked. The paralysis left her. She rose and, taking a small keyboard a well-meaning friend had brought to her from its place on a table in the corner, played the “Ode to Joy.”
In Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, Father Vaillant, having heard the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe and her tender solicitude for the people of Mexico, remarks that “the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love." And indeed, if miracles ought not, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, be the bedrock of faith, there is something about the miraculous that manages to give impetus to faith, to strike through the veil of the everyday, to seize the bleary-eyed soul and make at once a claim upon it, to which the soul can only respond by declaring for or against it.
Such, indeed, has been my experience with the miracle of my mom’s healing. In view of that moment, in view of coming to the hospital that day and finding my mother restored to me, I felt myself overcome by a tremendous assent, and not the assent of the intellect but the assent of the heart, of the deep core of personality where the stakes are final. If the miracle was something I could hold in my hands, it was beyond all else something that demonstrated to me the hands of another, the hands of one who has power to heal and restore and give life.
But the miracle, too, has its limits. If it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, part of the fear lies in the fact that we remain ourselves, in our sin and our failing and our fits of pique. In the twenty-four years since Mom’s stroke and her healing, years she has dedicated to teaching and to serving at the shrine of Fr. Seelos, now Blessed Seelos, I have watched her walk the strange fault lines of the self, drawn between the claims of the miracle and the strictures of life as a being beset by the anxieties of a fallen world, anxieties I, too, have discovered as time has gone on. Having been claimed by the miracle, why do I not allow myself to rest always in the miracle?
This peril is at the heart of Dr. Thomas More’s reluctance to seek a cure for his daughter–and her own reluctance, too–in Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins. “Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?” he wonders. The miracle makes its demands, and to feel the tension between those demands and the capacity to fulfill them, to feel oneself chafing under anger and lust and sloth with the miracle there as witness, is its own stroke of sorrow.
But miracles are also a means of revealing to us the miraculous character of all things. In Book X of his City of God, St. Augustine writes that creation itself from nothing is itself a miracle, the fashioning of a miraculous theater within which all the other marvels of God’s power unfold, a miracle so familiar we hardly note it: “the standing miracle of this visible world is little thought of, because always before us, yet, when we arouse ourselves to contemplate it, it is a greater miracle than the rarest and most unheard-of marvels. For man himself is a greater miracle than any miracle done through his instrumentality.”
What miracles remind us of is the fact that we see very little of all that transpires under the guidance of providence. As Father Latour responds to Father Vaillant’s expression of miraculous joy, “The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always." The challenge of faith, then, is one of allowing the perceptions to made continually finer that we might recognize the extraordinary character of the drama unfolding around us under God’s guiding hand. This is a great task and a difficult one, and one whose execution is always perilous.
Since that faraway June, I have brushed now and again against the miraculous. Once, during Mass in the crypt of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in D.C., I suddenly smelled roses, though none, apparently, were at hand. In the winds and the flood of Hurricane Katrina, when my childhood home was steeped in eight feet of water and the trees I had learned to climb had all come down, a bit of paper clung to our front door: the bottom half of a Divine Mercy card, with St. Faustina’s image torn away and only the words remaining, Jesus I trust in you. In such moments I have felt a draft, as it were, of the eternal presence of God through the lifted edge of the veil of time, have known anew the presence of the Virgin, have given myself again into the action of Christ. And the call of those moments as they come to mind again, years later, is to allow the awareness of God’s love to breach all moments, to let all speech and thought and deed be all awash in his presence. It is a call to recognition and to gratitude, to thanks for the given day, the pressing hour, to amazement at the faces of my children, whose life the love of man and woman alone could not have caused, immortal beings made so by the breath of God, miraculous themselves and more so in the Eucharistic miracle that knits God’s body into one.
In the miracle, we find something to cling to, and we begin, as we grasp it, to feel the claim it has laid to us and to see, slowly, slowly, the touch of God at work in all that is, inviting us to see at last as we are seen, to pray in thanksgiving for the miracle our fallen nature needs.
