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Thy Life's A Miracle. Speak yet again
Rev. Robin Landerman Zucker
UU Church of Reading
December 17, 200
If we were to define a "miracle" in classical terms we'd likely say that it is an event which cannot be explained by the laws of nature and which some would attribute to divine intervention. A breach of regularity in the functioning of the world. On the other hand, the Christian theologian Augustine remarked that "Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but in contradiction to what we know about nature."
Miracles are heralded and hyped with increasing frequency throughout our popular culture, including a plethora of websites. Many of these miracles are the slightly suspect stepchildren of the incident at Lourdes in 1858, when a young girl with healing powers named Bernadette was declared a saint. Thousands still travel to Lourdes and India, the shrine of Fatima and other well-known miraculous sites around the world in a quest for healing. The current tabloid miracle Meccas send up some troubling red flag for me. Many of them just seem ludicrous. Sadly, they also replace the sense of awe that miracles once embodied with a bizarre banality.
For example, an image of the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared on the rear fender of a Mr. Dario Mendoza's 1981 Chevrolet Camero in Elsa, Texas. Even after washing his car, the image grew larger, causing people to flock there to pray at the blessed bumper. His car appropriated by round-the-clock supplicants, the man had to resort to hitchhiking to work! Hundreds of people made a pilgrimage to a landscape painting purchased at an Oregon yard sale that was believed to harbor a living image of Our Lady of Guadeloupe. Holy apparitions are said to appear in flour tortillas, forkfuls of spaghetti, and in the bark of New Jersey blue spruce trees.
My personal favorite is the so-called Nun Bun, a cinnamon roll allegedly bearing the likeness of Mother Theresa which was discovered in a Nashville Bongo Java coffee shop. "I was horrified because I almost ate this religious piece of dough," confessed Ryan Finney, the employee who discovered the pious pastry. The bun has been the subject of a nine-minute documentary film, showed up on Leno and Letterman, and was eventually purchased for some obscene sum of money! The Nun Bun now resides in a freezer. The Rev. James Gill, a priest and psychiatrist who helps the Catholic church investigate folk miracles, views the majority of these claims as "either outright hoaxes or a pathetic bid for attention by the emotionally imbalanced or religiously confused." What's all of this about anyway? The phenomenon seems to point to a collective yearning for the sacred that is so great, a hunger for meaning that is so unmet, and a disenchantment with mere rationalism that is so profound that some folks resort to exalting pastries and paintings. It suggests to me that while we keep busy trying to locate the miraculous outside of nature, separate from ourselves, and beyond our everyday existence, we end up missing evidence of the Holy and the magical in "every cubic inch of space" as Walt Whitman put it. And it begs the question: Is life itself the miracle we overlook or undervalue while we're gazing hopefully into fenders?

The Church investigates apparitions. There have been apparitions of Christ, His Mother and numerous saints. Thee are still saints who's bodies are incorrupt.

The Church then makes a pronouncement. If the apparition is of a supernatural origin it is told to the people that it is 'worthy of belief.' One is free to believe or not. We are not mandated to believe in any apparitions. However the overwhelming (in my mind) evidence for many of these apparitions convinces me.

Think of this also. What is a better way for the devil to have people think all this is kooky? Have people believe they are seeing something when in fact they are not. The devil as you are aware, is a "false coiner", a counterfiter. After and during every appartion that I've read about, satan tries to lure the people away with falsehood and his own trickery. Kind of like Slick Willie, smoke and mirrors to dispense with the truth.