Rev. Linda Simmons
The Miraculous
December 13, 2015
A mother asked her son what he learned in Sunday School. He said he learned about the time Moses led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt. “When they reached the Red Sea, they crossed over on a pontoon bridge,” the boy said, “and did not get their feet at all wet while God sent a fighter aircraft to stop the Egyptian soldiers and blow up the pontoon bridge when the Egyptians tried to cross it.” She was surprised and asked if that was really what he was taught. He said, “No, but if I told you what the teacher said, you wouldn’t believe me.”[1]
Many have argued for centuries that the miraculous happens everyday and that we just don’t notice or have the ability to open our awareness or belief systems to include recognition of them.
Some of our greatest advocates of everyday miracles were the transcendentalists. Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Miracles have ceased. Have they indeed? When? They had not ceased this afternoon when I walked into the wood and got into bright, miraculous sunshine, in shelter from the roaring wind.”
And still many others believe in miracles whose source is not in nature, that are brought about through supernatural forces, like the parting of the red sea.
In this past week’s National Geographic, there was an article, “How the Virgin Mary Became the World’s Most Powerful Woman.” [2]
In it, account after account is rendered of miracles people from around the world experience through encounters with Mother Mary. I found these accounts fascinating. For instance, the one about Lourdes drew me in.
Shortly after World War II, members of the French and German militaries met at one of the most famous of Mother Mary apparition sites, Lourdes, a small market town lying in the foothills of the Pyrenees where Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old peasant girl, in 1848.
Members of the military still meet at Lourdes to reconcile and heal the wounds of war. On May 14, 2015, 184 wounded warriors—U.S. combat veterans who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan—and their families met at Lourdes. They had come for the annual pilgrimage of militaries (from 35 nations this year) to celebrate peace.
Retired Army Col. Dorothy A. Perkins, now 60, was among them. By 9/11 Perkins had already been to Iraq twice with the United Nations Special Commission as a team leader for weapons inspectors, and spent more than a decade in the Army in special ops. In 2006-07 she served as the principal adviser to the U.S. ambassador for hostage affairs in Iraq.
Perkins grew up a poor in an inner-city neighborhood in Tacoma, Washington, with her mother and an alcoholic stepfather.
Perkins recounts, “My faith has always been at the core of who I am. It’s a choice I made early on.” Without family to rely on, Perkins said, the Virgin Mary became her anchor. “She loves you as much as you want.”[3]
For Perkins, “Lourdes really forces each person to look at herself spiritually. Everything is always rushing by so fast. We’re overwhelmed by media and caught up in the day-to-day. People don’t force themselves to look at what’s most important—the integrity of the soul.”[4]
These words, the integrity of the soul, stayed with me. Soul corresponds with the Greek word, psyche which means life, spirit, consciousness.
How do we stay in integrity with our own lives, our own conscience? Perkins suggests we slow down. I heard her say too that we find a relationship to someone or something that “loves us as much as we want.”
Another account in this article was of 59 year old Arthur Boyle who first came to the small Roman Catholic chapel in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the village of Medjugorje in 2000 riddled with cancer and given months to live.
He met one of the “visionaries” there, Vicka Ivankovic-Mijatovic, in a jewelry shop and asked for her help. Gripping his head with one hand, she appealed to Mother Mary to ask God to cure him.
Boyle said he experienced an unusual sensation right there in the store. “She starts to pray over me. (My friends) Rob and Kevin put their hands on me, and the heat that went through my body from her praying was causing them to sweat.”[5]
Back in Boston a week later, a CT scan at Massachusetts General Hospital revealed that his tumors had shrunk to almost nothing.
Since then, Boyle has been back to Medjugorje (medugoreay )13 times. “I’m a regular guy,” he said. “I like to play hockey and drink beer. I play golf.” But, he continued, “I had to change things in my life.” Today, Boyle said, he’s become “a sort of mouthpiece for…the Mother and the power of her intercession.”
After reading this, I reflected for a long time on miracles and healing. I am not typically a believer in apparitions and those who lived long ago showing up to change the course of our lives, so these words and the rest of this article documenting hundreds of people healed through what they attest to be the power of Mother Mary asked me to look deeper.
Whenever I am on a quest to learn something new, to consider something I do not usually consider, I have to step out of my daily schedule and seek some stillness. I go to the beach or the woods or take a run or sit really quietly somewhere. I try to get still enough to check in with the integrity of my own soul, or consciousness.
Am I living in accordance with my values, am I proud of who I am, have I done something this week that I feel good about, have I treated those I love with kindness and those I have not yet learned to love with compassion?
If the answer to any of this is no, and it typically is in all of my humanity, then that is the first bit of work. I cannot get still until I come to terms with my own life’s work.
And then, I settle in. What am I missing? What have I not seen? What have I not experienced that has been right beside me but I have been too blinded by my own vision to see?
This week, there was something unexpected that took me out of my daily life. I went to Virginia to sit with my dying brother Steven.
When someone is dying, whether someone we love or not, time changes. Everything slows down to a breath. On those long nights sitting with my brother, taking shifts with my sister-in-law, I would find myself matching my breath with my brother’s. Each breath, each second, filled with a lifetime, with memories, stories, laughter, sorrow, regret, love, loss.
Each sound outside seemed enormous to me and so new. My brother, his wife and son live in the country and each cow mooing brought me to tears as if I had never heard that sound before, as if the whole earth was offering up a tribute to Steven’s life and a lament to his dying.
And in that stillness, in that presence, in that sacred space, Steven’s cancer did not heal, and yet healing did take place. No saviors entered the room, and yet there was a salvation that occurred.
It’s when we sit still, open enough to know our hearts are beating that we can experience the miraculous around us- all of it. Why should any image that we have built that symbolizes the holiest of the holy not be part of what we experience when we open ourselves to our own humanity and the humanity of others, including Mother Mary or Allah or Jesus or Yahweh or the Mother Goddess?
Why should we not be capable of healing then, loving then, forgiving then, being born anew then?
It is not that miracles came to those people who saw Mother Mary, its that they entered the miraculousness of love, of hope, of belief in utter beauty and transcendence. They opened their hearts to being loved as much as they wanted, to being touched by strangers and friends, to being focused on, to being prayed over, to being cared for enough that they could feel cared for and from there, they saw reflections of their own holiness. And in that experience, everything is possible.
The miracle is in remaining fully human in the face of all of life because within the fullness of our humanity, all of it, lives all the possibility that can be, lives the miracle.
For my brother and I, the miracle was forgiveness and acceptance of the life that we had been given as children and the life that we had both made as adults. The miracle was letting go of regret and being in the genuine love we feel for each other. The miracle was love.
And in love, life is eternal. That is a miracle my friends.
May you know a love that loves you as much as you want. May you let yourself be seen and touched and cared for until your very soul is visible and the holiness of your own life appears to you and healing is possible.
Amen.
1
[1] http://uubinghamton.org/2014/05/parables-of-miracles/
[2] Maureen Orth, “How the Virgin Mary Became the World’s Most Powerful Woman” National Geographic, November 8, 2015 http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/virgin-mary-text
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.