Give Us This Day posted the above prayer today. It represents Augustine's prayer and a consoling and challenging theology. For many it will be hard to understand a God who does not reach into the situation the world finds itself in and intervene by destroying the Corona Virus and healing all of those afflicted. But that is not the way the God of Jesus Christ works. Yes, Our God is a God of miracles, a God who breaks in upon us with an unimaginable and rarely-well-enough-anticipated Love, but, as God did with Mary and with Jesus, the truly miraculous, the moments when Love breaks through and changes everything occur when human beings, through the power of the Holy Spirit, allow themselves to be fully open and responsive to the dynamic God Who is the ground and source of all of reality.
In the New Testament there is no word "miracle". What we call miracles and think of as events which break all the normal laws of nature, were called "acts of power" and were events that occurred when the deepest law, dynamic, or living dimension of all reality, the "law" or reality of Love, broke through everything separating us from it producing new life and meaning. They were precisely what happened when the God who accompanies us, who watches and waits with us, who is the ever-continuing source, sanctifier, and salvation of all reality was allowed to truly be God. Miracles in this sense are not a breaking of the natural law, but its realization in fullness.
Some will pray for God to stop this pandemic. I join them in this prayer. But I do not look for God to intervene in some sort of Deus ex machina way. The miracles I pray for involve the God who works in and through us to change the world, to renew hearts, and to transform reality. I pray that all people will accept the requirement to shelter in place because they come to see how intertwined we all are as a human family, and because they chose self-sacrifice and generosity over selfishness. That would be genuinely "miraculous" and reveal a deep truth Christ proclaimed that our competitive, consumerist world ordinarily militates against. I pray that every one of us uses our imagination and creativity to bring people together in new ways, to love and care for the hitherto forgotten, and proclaim the Gospel of the God of Life with our own lives. I pray that our medical personnel are given every bit of equipment they need to diagnose, treat, and ultimately to defeat this virus and prepare for the next pandemic. I pray that each of us learns the truth and power of God's Love mediated in the myriad small ways human beings are called on daily to do for one another. That would indeed be an Easter miracle as Life and hope is brought out of death and despair.
Our God accompanies us in every moment and mood of our lives if only we will open ourselves to this Presence. Jesus demonstrated this on the Cross. It is the very meaning of "obedience unto death." Jesus opens himself to the One he calls Abba not only unto death, but unto godless death. His Abba accompanies him into the deepest depths of hell even when he is not aware of that presence. This same God thus brings good out of evil, meaning out of absurdity, and life out of death through this same Christological openness or obedience. This is the Good News of Easter, the mediated power of God made perfect in weakness that Christians recognize as the heart of what we call the genuinely "miraculous". And so, in Christ, we who are God's own saints open ourselves to this God as we pray, "Watch, O Lord . . ."
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