The more bizarre in the miracle department

(The link in the title is to a previous post about devotion to Saint Gerard, whose feast day was on the 16th of October.)

Frequently, I am 'torn in two directions' in my religious faith. My faithful readers will recall that I currently am studying the philosophy of religion in depth. Two of the areas which this involves are related to miracles and to prayers of petition. Neither, even if they were taken to be valid (which I certainly believe), could be presented as proofs for divine creativity in this world - I rather like John Hick's apt comment that, were God to make his presence clearly, much less majestically, clear, our response could be that of those in awe or fear of power, rather than one of trust and love.

Saint Gerard, who was a favourite saint of my mother's, was one of those saints who it would be wonderful to honour, but generally a poor idea to imitate. He was a very simple man, excessive in penance and devotion, one to take things far too literally. Unlike most post-Reformation saints, he was known for miracles of all sorts, some quite strange, during his lifetime. As a child, he had the Child Jesus (in the form of a statue which periodically came to life in Gerard's presence) for a playmate. Said Child also provided Gerard with loaves of bread. In later years, Gerard was known to fly through the air, appear and rescue a ship in danger, use his old friend the Child Jesus statue to retrieve a lost key from a well, and so forth.

This is unrelated, but permit me a loose association. David Hume, who was Gerard's contemporary (not that they'd ever have met or known of each other...), raised questions which did need to be asked about miracles. Hume also was a total snob and fashionable atheist / sceptic. I would be the first to have reservations about reports of miracles. I firmly believe that, when what is not miraculous is reported as such, or when (as stories of Gerard would appear to those unfamiliar with the overall picture of the man) odd happenings seem holy in direct proportion to their element of the bizarre, the well intentioned can find that they detract from, rather than enhance, understanding of a God who is not only creator but active in his creation for always. Yet I think Hume was very wrong on two of his snobbish ideas. First, he assumed that believers who report miracles generally know them not to be true, but will not compromise lest they spoil the 'good cause' in which reports of miracles are supposed to encourage faith. Second, he believed that tales of miracles were common to uneducated, lower class people who were very open to 'wonder' but not likely to consider the unreality.

I'm wondering how many lower class people Hume actually knew. (I'm lower class but educated - those of us who are highly educated in any area other than sciences are sadly addicted to 'wonder' in many cases.) I could understand how, for example, an intelligent, prominent writer such as Arthur Conan Doyle (and this in a period of bereavement) could be ready to accept the photographs of the Cottingley faeries as genuine. (Granted - my medieval background gives me an image of faeries as rather less benevolent and sweet than the Victorian standard, but I'll blush and admit that I'd read a report of faeries sightings with great interest.) Were I to replace the 'subject' with, let us say, my father and his brothers and friends, I know it would be more likely that they'd consider such photographs to be, at best, nice liners for the cat box. I could far more easily see some great 1st century intellectual, filled with philosophy, literature, Plato's ideas of the soul, whatever, believing a man rose from the dead than imagine such a far fetched idea being congenial to Mediterranean peasants such as the apostles.

Returning to Gerardo and other souls disposed to the oddly miraculous: For all my romantic side, I am very wary of miracles, much as I believe they are possible. Yet there is an element in 'miracle stories' which those too ready to scoff often forget. First off, miracles (including those of Jesus) normally involve expressions of faith, personal conversion, and reconciliation to a community. Second, far more miracles have to do with one's already having been disposed to prayer, trust, and awareness of divine providence than with demonstrations of power to prove anything!

I would not care to have experienced having a statue come to life as a playmate, or flying sans aircraft, or commanding a demon to lead my horse when I was lost. Fortunately, I am caught in the banality of orthopraxy, largely saying Offices, rather than in manifestations which (given my own temperament, dispositions, and the like) would have landed me in a bed in Bedlam. Yet I am not ready to rule out that such things, possibly, could happen in cases where one's dedication and faith were such that one was open to, indeed expected, divine providence.

Hume assumes defiance of the laws of nature in reports of miracles. Far more often, at least in common parlance, 'miracles' do not involve the sun and moon standing still in the sky, or anyone's amputated leg growing back, but in a sense of providence. I'm too intellectual, and never had such tender and trusting faith. I'd fear seeing God's work in my life as providential, because I'm too aware of the wickedness in this world, and what horrid suffering is part and parcel of a majority of lives on the planet. Yet I sometimes wonder if prayers of petition (whether they led to the result for which one prayed, or changed one's life and attitudes, whatever) might be far more effective only if one already had embraced a life of metanoia, prayer, conversion already.

Cautious though I am about reports of miracles, the fact remains that my own faith is basically constructed on reports of 1st century peasants who saw a man who had risen from the dead.