Initial Thoughts on Rereading Miracles

To explore C.S. Lewis’ notion, in Miracles, that miracles are not interventions in reality of something outside of it, that they don’t in fact disrupt the natural order (hard claims to which to give assent), and particularly the far more intriguing claim that they amount to God’s signature on his creation (to borrow a word from Whitman that expresses much the same notion) or his characteristic artistic flourish—this is worth a moment’s pause. What miracles would not be, then, would be the get out of jail free card touted by virtually everyone who promotes them—the quack television and mega-church evangelists peddling false hope and false religion and reaping for this personal fortunes from the easily duped. Miracles are not the way around cancer or kidney disease. Though a miraculous cure is not out of the realm of the possible with a God who actually does miracles, it would have the status of a random event from nearly every perspective—not a cure earned by a good life or fervent prayer or a prayer chain set up around the globe, like a power boost in a video game (which would make God the champion of the popular or well-resourced, the God whom the New Testament insists would prefer to bless the lonely woman, homeless and friendless, than the pope, who ought to have faith enough anyway to endure not just cancer but an actual cross if need be. The miracle is a phenomenon, strategically deployed, as it were, to say, in effect, “I am God,” (the signature) and, “If I had it my way you would not have to endure this suffering.”

Why God can’t have it his way is a separate question, addressed, at great length though not necessarily with great success by that other Pope, Alexander, in his “Essay on Man.”

Miracles then in a curious way align the Christian world with the Greek world of Tragedy. The union of Judaism with Platonism produced Christianity, as is well attested, but the connection of Judaism with that other, and rival, Greek notion of Tragedy has been, as far as I know, a lot less explored. But here there is a connection.

The most fundamental aspect of tragedy, to my mind, one which Aristotle himself never quite hit upon, is this: It should not have to have been. Any muthos (is that Ricoeur’s word?) that leads the reader to this understanding of the absolute necessity of a resolution that should have been able to have been stopped, that heady glot of countervailing forces—that is tragedy. There should have been a way to prevent the tragedy of Oedipus. But there could not have been any way and nothing could have stopped it. If only we’d known what we could not possibly have known we could have done the thing that there was no possibility of doing. This must be the position in which a Christian, though he does not ever articulate it as such, must believe God sits. The miracles show that God does not want the world to suffer its way back to the lost paradise. But there is no other way. And what ties the omniscient God’s hands we can’t know. For whatever reason. (Lewis does an excellent and I think important job of laying out the necessity of the fundamental ignorance we must have of what we can only call “being itself,” the universe as God “sees” it, the universe as it is. We can know neither it nor our ignorance of it any more than our beloved dog and can know what we people are up to in any way that does not involve her. No need to go into all that again.)

Miracles then have an element of sadness to them, the “wish I could do more,” of a doctor who instead of curing the patient gives her an aspirin, the fireman who in lieu of saving the house rescues a teddy bear.

Thoughts Inspired by a Cosmologist, Hooray

Science is a discourse and a method. There is nothing else like it. Its fundamental premise is that we humans can understand the physical universe through observation with the help of math. It has made marvelous progress. There is nothing humans have ever done that is more exciting. But let’s not let our enthusiasm run away with us. That essential premise has never been proved. The progress is phenomenal. We’ve gone so much farther than it seems we could have hoped when the enterprise began (though we did have that comprehensive hope). And there have been times when we thought were almost there, with Newton, with Einstein. But the scope of what we do not know keeps getting clearer and larger. The real likelihood of vast realms of being that we cannot understand grows, so that now we instead of saying “we’ll get there some day,” say “how amazing it is that we can know as much as we can.” What banged in the big bang? What exactly is this dark matter? How will we ever know anything that cannot be described by math?
Science is a discourse and a method. It should not be an ideology or a religion. It excludes a priori what cannot be brought into its orbit, God and spirit and soul. It gives no testimony against these concepts. I heard a Harvard cosmologist become verbally entangled when she attempted to exclude beauty as a principle of truth. She was right to exclude beauty, since beauty comes from a realm of being outside the realm of science. It is a religious or a purely evolutionary concept. There may be no such thing as beauty is science understands “thing.”
But there also may be. This cosmologist dismissed what (it seems to me) she has no time for. The demands of science are enormous both professionally and personally. Every scientist knows the breakthrough he/she is working for, dedicated to, may not happen in his/her lifetime. May not happen at all. Every scientist knows his/her theories may be dead ends or may lead where experiment and observation cannot go. It is necessary then to dismiss God and beauty with a wave. Wave them off. We all benefit from this work, though in waving off these things it seems to me the scientist reduces the quest to the status of a game, a very expensive way to satisfy nothing more profound than curiosity. (Yes, we know there will be effects, from GPS to nuclear weapons, and the discoveries will change the world, but it is quest is never for the effects. The opening of Pandora’s box, the revelation of Goddes privetee, it’s done to find out what’s inside.) Of course, this too must be accepted if the ideology of science, which would require that humans in their brief lives find something interesting to do. To while away the time.

A Good Right-Wing Response to the Football Protests

Mike Pence went to a Colts-49ers game today with the single intention of walking out with great hue and cry in order to stoke the anger of what’s called the Republican base.

It was a dumb move.

But it makes one think about what a good right wing move would be. And that’s neither hard to see nor difficult to do. A good right wing response to the protests would go like this:

I understand the motive behind this protests. And I agree that too many black men are being shot and jailed in America, and I realize that too often the law makes the situation worse. More needs to be done to solve that problem. And it’s good and proper to bring attention to the problem.

However, this particular form of protest strikes a number of good and loyal Americans as unpatriotic. That may not have been the intention, but it has been amply shown that to many people this appears to be a protest against the nation and the flag. To many it dishonors the sacrifice of the military while doing nothing to advance the cause for which it was begun. I therefore believe is not a suitable way to protest the injustice it was designed to protest. Let’s come together and find another way.


It happens that I disagree strongly with that second paragraph. But I know there are good people, good Americans who cannot see past the perceived affront to patriotism. And I could respect anyone who, while maintaining his dignity and seeking common ground, refuses to sanction what he/she sees as an affront to the country.

What I cannot stand is the divisive grandstanding of party hacks like Mike Pence, whose view of the protest is deliberately divisive and belligerently blinkered. He ignores the legitimate complaint that underlies the protest while painting in the bright colors of his cartoonish logic—all to score political points. (I say that assuming his not really stupid enough to believe his own rhetoric, though I have to say I haven’t seen a whole lot of evidence to support that generous allowance.)

Mike Pence is under the delusion that his presence at an NFL game lends dignity to the event merely (I guess) because he is Vice President. This would perhaps be true if he were doing his actual job. He’s not. Pence’s actions as well as his rhetoric paint the issue in provocatively black and white terms, both logically and racially. That is the worst possible reaction particularly from the White House whose job is unite.

If Not Exactly Silver

Though I don’t want to seem to be making light
of serious things, I can’t help but recall the couple
who, as Murphy’s law predicts, came down with Alzheimer’s
at the same time,
which progressed at the same rate
and, though they did die together
in the fire that consumed their house,
they spent most of the time between the onset and the blaze
falling in love.

If God Speaks in the Thunder

God can only say
Life is brief, life is precarious,
Do not look for what is not there
Do not look to me to save you
When the dog quivers and hides,
When the trees flash in the ominous dark
When the lightening sets your house afire.
I will not calm the earthquake
I will not plug the volcano.
Take refuge where and when and as you can.
I will not stay the hungry fist
I will not stick my finger in the muzzle of the gun.
And even if I did, you would die.
I will not spare you loneliness
Nor lengthen your days of love.
I will not halt the spread of sickness in your bones.
I will neither warm the sun in winter on the homeless streets
Nor cool it in summer between Sonoyta and Phoenix.
I am the lord, the God almighty. My love is like a mighty river
Behind a broken dam.
I will not hold back its waters.

The Aardvark and the Snake

The snake twists across the desert sand. There’s
No other animal in sight,
And it’s a fast snake, sashaying over the dry land
In the shade of the rocks, leaving behind
Not even a blade of bent grass as a sign
It was here, a curling wave that erases itself
Like a wave in a pool after a splash. Nothing left
But a scent so faint you’d need a nose as big as an
Aarkvark’s pressed into the ground to pick it up.

An aardvark appears.
Half hour later in search of water
She wanders by, nose to the ground. By that time the fat
Muscled venomous rope has crossed three outcrops
And more scrub than a passing man
Could keep track of on its way to its lair in this one particular
Pile of stones miles and miles from the thirsty
Aardvark.

It's moving ever farther from the aardvark, moving away from the aardvark
faster than the aardvark is moving.

The aardvark follows the scent, faint, but strong enough.
The aardvark is not half as fast as the snake. By the time it passes
That first outcrop, the snake is safely curled
In the cool and sleepy shade of its home under the rocks,
Whose entrance is a hole so small that nothing
larger than a snake could pass through.

The slow thirsty aarkvark saunters over the sands.
The sun climbs, and then begins to slide down the cloudless sky.
The aardvark rocks on its hips like a delivery truck with bad suspension
On an unpaved country road. The snake tastes the air continually,
Snakishly. Before the sun
Falls half way to the horizon, the aardvark, its nose never leaving the sand
Bumps into the rock by the entrance to the tiny hole high above the snake.
The vigilant snake tastes its enemy in the air with its nervous tongue.
The aardvark forces her thick proboscis into the narrow hole until she
Knows for sure: this is the place. The snake feels the dim light disappear and
Tastes the strong aardvark taste it hates. Thick as the smell of sweat.
The aardvark digs. The aardvark widens the hole left and right, grunting
And snorting, minute by minute. The snake circles in the cul de sac of its safety.
The aardvark pushes her head into the widening hole. Pulls back and digs some more.
Pushes her shoulders into the hole. Pulls back and digs some more.
The snake pools his venom in the sacks behind the fangs like gagging spit.
The aardvark reaches her forepaws, head, and shoulders into the pit.
The snake strikes, hurls his long body through the smoky tunnel. He
Sinks his razor jaws into the aardvark’s shoulder, drains two deep reservoirs
Of venom into the aardvark’s blood. His enemy, the aardvark, immune, blocking
The exit, pushes her whole body into the chamber.