Faith in a Reality Rooted in the Miraculous

[[Hi Sister Laurel, in your last post on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, you spoke of miracles and the fact that our ordinary world is truly extraordinary. Do you believe in miracles? I would like to believe that way, but I just cannot. I have never experienced a miracle; nothing happened when I prayed for one. Is Christianity built on the miraculous? If it is, I wonder how anyone can be a Christian. It seems to contradict what is reasonable or rational.]]

Thanks for your questions. They are good and typical of human beings in a post-enlightenment world. Yes, I do believe in the miraculous; I believe miracles occur wherever the power of love breaks through everything in our world that militates against love or the life that is created by love. God is the ground and source of all that exists and has meaning and God is love-in-act. This means that everything we know or will come to know is grounded in the dynamism of love-in-act. Love is the source of life, meaningful life. I believe that love is capable of defeating evil and overcoming death in all its forms and I believe that the stories in Scripture reiterate this overarching narrative again and again.

Christianity is built on the power of love. Christian faith is faith in the power of God's love, the love that creates and orders reality, the love that overshadowed Mary and impregnated her with Jesus, the love that allowed Jesus to heal, and exorcise, to give himself exhaustively so people would know this love-in-act he called Abba, and of course, the love that is stronger than death and raised Jesus to new life.  I believe in this power of love because I have known it in my own life. I have experienced the risen Christ, and of course, I have been loved by those who have also known and come to live from and for the embrace of God's love. It has done for them what only God can do and has acted in my life as well. That has been true in different situations where death and evil seemed to have had the upper hand and changed everything. This experience of love, particularly of God as love-in-act, convinces me our world is rooted in the miraculous and that ordinary existence much more.

Christian faith then, asks us to trust that what seems ordinary is really quite extraordinary. Not only does the cosmos exist when it might well not exist (the fact that there is something rather than nothing at all is something science cannot explain), but even more, it is knowable and capable of mediating truth, beauty, goodness, and occasioning wonder and love. I think one of the reasons we celebrate Advent is to allow us time to check out how we look at reality. If we are incapable of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary we need practice (and sometimes help with the healing of our minds and hearts) in order to see with "new eyes". What Christmas brings us is a God who chooses to dwell with us and to transfigure our humanity into the true images of God we were made to be. It prepares us to understand ourselves as infinitely precious, capable of mediating God to others and stewarding his creation in the way he has entrusted to us. It allows us to see God at work in our world so that one day heaven and earth fully interpenetrate one another. This leads to hope, a well-grounded hope rooted in the God of love and built with the aid of our faithful intelligence, hard work, and good will.