“If this is how you treat your friends, I’m not surprised you have so few.”

For All Saints Day, it seems appropriate to chip in on the exchange a few days ago about the story of Lazarus and other incidents in the Gospels. Jerry described them as awful stories. Chris was soothing, suggesting that literal interpretations are not edifying. In the case of Lazarus, Chris assured us that it was a resuscitation, not a resurrection.

It seems to me that one very clear lesson stands out from 4000 years of stories about relationships between our God and those God calls His own. Being God’s friend is tough. Not just because of the way others treat you when you put God first – though almost every prophet, almost every saint, has been scorned and persecuted at some time and in some way. But also because of the extras that God loads on those closest to Him. Physical illness. Lost opportunities. Rejection. Separation from the certainty of his presence. A call to serve where they least want to go.

A good God, we are told (by implication, at least), wouldn’t want us to suffer. I think that’s twaddle. Our good God wants us to spend eternity with God, and God’ll do whatever necessary to make that happen.

I have little patience for the idea that anything uncomfortable in Scripture must have been misinterpreted right up until the new filters applied by the clever clogs of the last fifty years. It is hard to see how John could have intended his Lazarus story to be read allegorically given the details he included: such as the corpse stinking.

And, while I get the tragedy of the whole story, I don’t agree with Jerry as to what the tragedy was. He suggests several ways in which the raising of Lazarus was horrible: that he was raised and others weren’t; that his family had been mourning him; that he now had to die again. To me, the greatest tragedy is that Lazarus was safely on the other side of death and he was dragged back. And Jesus thought it was a tragedy, too. He wept at the thought. And just over a week later, he was himself tortured and killed (which, when you think about it, might explain why the focus of the story didn’t stay with Lazarus). So he didn’t ask his friends to do anything he wasn’t prepared to do himself.

It seems to me Jerry wants a bob each way: On the one hand, if there is no God and no eternal life, then Lazarus wasn’t raised. On the other hand, if there is a God and is an eternal life, a few days here or there are pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If death is the end, there is no story. If death is not the end, then the story isn’t awful (though it is certainly aweful).

Does God’s approach to God’s friends mean God is not good? I don’t think so. God has a different time scale and a different perspective. A child, sent to bed so that they can be fresh for a party coming up the next day, or deprived of cake because it contains an ingredient that will make them ill, may well accuse the parent of being ‘bad’. But the parent has a broader perspective. Even then; both parent and child are human. How can we timebound, finite, creatures judge the behaviour of the infinite creator? We accept quite freely that each species has its own standards by which it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. When we say God is ‘good’, we expect God’s moral values to be at least as ‘good’ as ours; but we’re daft if we think that means we’ll always understand them.

Being God’s friend is a tough job. St Teresa of Avila, one of my favourite saints, is reported to have shaken her fist at heaven and declaimed: “If this is how you treat your friends, I’m not surprised you have so few.” Nonetheless, she thought it was worth it. She also said:

Let nothing trouble you,
let nothing frighten you.
All things are passing;
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
He who possesses God lacks nothing:
God alone suffices.

St Paul says something similar:

As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,  neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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Rosa Mundi, poem 2

Annunciation

The white sun burns; the room is dim;
the dark girl drifts and dreams within.

Another light burns, whiter far;
it lights the room, invading star.

The dark girl screams, but sound is pale;
the starlight burns, a fiery Hail.

She baulks, refuses, turns her face;
the starlight echoes, Full of grace…

She bows her head; she says, Behold;
she drinks the star; its light is cold.

The star is out; the sun is dim;
the dark girl is lit within.

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Trust in God

Jennifer over on Conversion Diary is musing about trust in God in the context of answers to prayer. Here are what she calls her initial thoughts:

I don’t have all the answers, but my initial thought is that appropriate trust in God hinges on having a proper understanding the following three things:

1. Who God is
2. What God wants
3. What the meaning of life is

Who God is:
He’s not a wish-granting genie. He’s not a concierge. He’s not a living magic wand for us to wield to change the world according to our liking. He’s our heavenly Father, and he is perfect and all-knowing — in other words, his ideas are better than ours, and he knows what’s best for us more than we do. We can get way off track of we start to forget this.

What God wants:
I’ve heard many amazing stories of divine providence at work in people’s lives, and one common thread is that people who experience a lot of this crazy miraculous stuff live their lives according to what God wants, not what they want. I wrote about this more here, but these people spend a lot of time asking: “Lord, what do you want me to pray for?”

So, to use the example of the cake for the Bible study tea, I do believe that that was God at work, but I don’t believe that the cake appeared because the missionaries were in the mood for something sweet. Each day they spent hours in prayer seeking the Lord’s guidance. The idea to host the event didn’t come from their personal whims, but rather was an idea the Holy Spirit gave them in prayer — thus it’s no surprise that all the details just so happened to work out.

What the meaning of life is:
I think this is where it’s easiest for us Americans to go wrong, and where many “health and wealth gospel” proponent have gone wrong. Surrounded by incomparable wealth, luxury and access to medical care, it’s easy to start to think of our lives here on earth as our eternal destinations. The natural human inclination is to make the overarching goal of our lives to have the longest, healthiest, most comfortable life here on earth as possible. But that’s not how the saints have seen it, and it’s not how God sees it. Not that God wants us to suffer — suffering and death wasn’t even part of the world he originally planned for us — but, in a heaven-centered worldview, suffering is not the worst evil. Sin is.

And that’s another thing I’ve noticed about people who seem to have radical but healthy trust in God: they accept this. They trust that God will pave the way for them to get themselves and others on a path to heaven, and know that sometimes it will involve sending cake for a tea party…and other times it might involve suffering, or even an early death. But when they compare that prospect to an eternity of ecstatic peace, it doesn’t seem like such a bad proposition.

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John Paul II to be beatified on Divine Mercy Sunday

The Vatican has announced that John Paul II is to be beatified.

Catholic Culture has the details.

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Truth, myth, and history

Further to the post about St Winifred, the shrine website has a discussion of the double miracle (the new well, and the restoration of the young girl’s severed head) that seems relevant to the conversation we’ve been having on an earlier thread about the truth in the Bible.

For modern men and women, it is not so much the wonderful restorations to health which happened and still happen at the Well which pose a problem of belief and understanding, but the double “miracle” at the heart of the medieval legend of St Winefride which initiated the pilgrimage and the sequence of healings – the sudden appearance of the water and the resurrection of the dead woman. How is one to interpret the legend, without explaining away the truth that countless numbers of people down the centuries have found at its core?

Jonah in the belly of a fish

Of course, before modern times these miracles presented no real problem: to God, after all, all things were possible. Every Christian believed that the Son of God rose from the dead after His crucifixion; and before that Jesus had restored His friend Lazarus to life, in order, as He prayed to His Father, “that they may believe that Thou hast sent me” (St John 11:42).

The legend of St Winefride was only written down 500 years after the events it describes were said to have occurred. But it is important to recognise that Winefride and Beuno were real people who had really lived in 7th-century Wales.

Their written “Lives” are not history as this is understood today, but symbolic explorations of such facts about them that local oral tradition had preserved. Historians are free to interpret this rich mixture of fact and legend as best fits all the information.

An economical explanation would tell us that the Well was always here, but took on a new meaning in the light of the events that happened beside it in the 7th century; and then with time this meaning suggested to tradition that the Well itself was new. Beuno’s own medieval Welsh “Life” strongly suggests that he had an extraordinary power to heal troubled minds. Perhaps it was that Winefride was not killed in the brutal rape attack, but was severely wounded and traumatised, to be nursed back to mental and physical health, to “new life”, by St Beuno. Both “Lives” of St Winefride stress the scars that she bore to the end of her life.

The martyrdom of St Winefride is illustrated in a window in St Winefride’s Catholic church in Holywell. The window was presented by pilgrims in 1860
The “Lives” also stress that people came to visit the girl who had returned to life, and to see the scars that witnessed to that restoration. Symbolically, Winefride had returned from the dead. But the medieval exploration of the symbolism went further than this, as the “Lives” and other medieval texts reveal. Like Lazarus, Winefride pointed towards the resurrection of Jesus, and beyond Jesus, to the eventual resurrection of all who would believe in Him. Symbolically, Winefride’s resurrection guaranteed to all who cared to meditate upon her story the general resurrection promised to all believers. The symbolism went further still. Christian teaching understood that believers were incorporated into Christ through the sacrament of baptism; the going into and coming out of the baptismal font was experienced as a death to sin and a rising to new life; and baptism was in this way the means of approaching the general resurrection.

Winefride – the Welsh Lazarus – went down into death and returned to life through a special mercy of God. For Christians, their baptism paralleled this experience. And, like Winefride going down to death and rising to life, and like the Christian entering the waters of baptism and coming forth to spiritual wholeness, the sick pilgrim to Holywell went down into the waters of the Well and came out restored to health. Symbolically imitating Winefride, renewing their own baptisms, and incorporating themselves into Christ, all devout pilgrims to Holywell have experienced their pilgrimage as a profound symbol of their whole spiritual life.

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Jack – Mary MacKillop’s reserve miracle

Jack Simpson's recovery of his mental facilities has been called a miracle by his doctors and the Vatican.

The Simpson family’s ordeal began in 1999 when Jack, then eight, collapsed at school. ”At first we thought he’d hit his head. His eyes were rolling, he couldn’t stand and had no comprehension. It was unbelievably horrible,” Mrs Simpson said yesterday.

For the first year there was no diagnosis, as his central nervous system went into meltdown, leaving him paralysed. Soon after the problem was revealed as juvenile MS – with a maximum life expectancy of five years – the family noticed lumps the size of bars of soap in his neck and groin.

”When he went to the nuclear medicine department and they put the tracer in, he was lit up like a Christmas tree. It was quite advanced, stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

A friend organised novenas (nine-day prayer cycles) to Mary MacKillop at St Ambrose’s Catholic Church at Woodend in 1999 and 2000, but nothing changed at first.

For Mrs Simpson the turning point came one night in 2000.

”That night I thought Jack was going to die. He seemed to be in the last stage, with the breath rattling. I thought, ‘You can’t keep fighting forever, you have to surrender,’ and I said, ‘If you want him, God, you can have him.’ ”

But in the morning he was still alive. She thought he might be cured, so she stood him up, but he was still paralysed.

”That’s when Mary MacKillop appeared. She helped me lift him up and get him back into bed. From then on, I knew I was never alone and her strength became mine.”

Jack started improving. One day in 2004, at a routine cognitive assessment at the Children’s, Mrs Simpson was greeted by a doctor telling her something wonderful had happened. ”The MS was gone, the cancer was gone, the epilepsy controlled – he now suffers about one episode a year – and his cognitive faculties were returning.”

Jack is now 19, and is on his way to Rome to attend the canonisation ceremonies. Read the rest of the story in the Melbourne Age.

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Second miracle under investigation

John Henry Newman

On the eve of the beatification of John Henry Newman, the Catholic Church is about to send someone to Mexico to investigate a miracle. If confirmed, it may be the second miracle required for canonisation.

Catholic officials are investigating claims that a severely deformed baby was born in a perfectly normal condition after the child’s mother prayed to Cardinal John Henry Newman for a miracle.

Andrea Ambrosi, the Vatican lawyer in charge of Cardinal Newman’s cause for canonization, has revealed in a BBC program to be broadcast Sept. 18 that he hopes the inexplicable healing may be the miracle needed to canonize Cardinal Newman as Britain’s next saint…

“I am about to leave for Mexico City precisely because that could be the miracle for his canonization,” Ambrosi said in the documentary — “Newman: Saint or Sinner?” — excerpts of which were released by the BBC Sept. 9.

The alleged healing occurred after prenatal scans revealed that the unborn baby was “severely deformed.” … The mother, a devout Catholic, insisted on going through with the pregnancy.

“The child was born perfect following the mother praying to Newman, and scientists can’t explain it.”

For more, see the CNS story these clips were taken from.

English journalist and author John Cornwell says:

John Henry Newman is simply the most electrifying religious thinker and writer in English of the past 200 years – subtle, imaginative, deeply learned, at times maddeningly paradoxical and dialectical. James Joyce and Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed that he was the finest English prose stylist of the 19th century. His range is prodigious: poetry (“The Dream of Gerontius”), fiction, history, hymns (famously, “Lead, Kindly Light”), many hundreds of published sermons, as well as profound works of theology and philosophy. His Apologia Pro Vita Sua is by common consent the greatest spiritual autobiography since Augustine’s Confessions. A literary workaholic, he prayed with a pen in his hand. Believing in Christianity, he thought, was like falling in love. His motto was “Heart speaks unto Heart”; bullying and clever arguments, he said, do not bring us to God.

Here is a link to the story of the first miracle.

And here’s an explanation of the process of canonisation.

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When miracles don’t come through

Further to my posts on prayer and on miracles, comes this post by Practicing Catholic written three months after the death of her father. I urge you to read the whole thing. Here, though, is just one of the points that she makes:

I am reminded that it’s not all about me.  Life and creation do not revolve around me and my needs and wants.  God doesn’t drop everything and everybody else in the universe to cater to me.  I am just one person, just one creature.  My little life is at least a third over already.  I am just a tiny mote of dust.  Does that mean that God doesn’t love me?  Does that mean He doesn’t care?  No.  Part of God’s greatness is that He loves me, even me, with an infinite love and care–and not only that, but He loves all the other little motes of dust in exactly the same way, without ever having His love exhausted!

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Miracles – direct interventions

Finally, we get to what might be called real miracles – the ones where God himself intervenes.

With my usual passion for sorting things into categories, I’m calling them:

• my job here is (not) done
• signs and wonders.

In other words, I’m speculating here about what God’s purpose for performing a miracle might be.

First, let me briefly recap on previous posts on this topic. I’ve defined a miracle as an intervention by God in the normal workings of the universe. I’ve explored all sorts of wonders, and concluded that they are evidence of an awesome, amazing, universe – but not necessarily miracles in the sense of that particular definition.

I’ve also acknowledged the sense in which the existence and operation of the universe is a miracle, and therefore everything in it likewise.

I’ve claimed two everyday events – the ensoulling of a zygote and the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic host – as miracles in the strict sense of the definition.  

And I’ve dismissed most of what is normally claimed as miraculous as very likely being the normal workings of a universe that is subject to the will of the Almighty.

This, incidentally, answers (to my satisfaction, anyway) most of those questions about ‘why did God save this one, and not that; why did He answer this prayer and not that?’

But I also believe that God does – from time to time – intervene directly (apart from the two everyday cases above). So when? And why?

My job here is (not) done?

This seems to me to cover a great heap of instances: miraculous escapes; miraculous healings.

To understand why God might intervene to protect one person, but not another, we need to accept three things.

Death is change

First: death isn’t as bad as it’s cracked up to be. It seems to me that those who argue this case come from one of two positions:

1. There is no God (or at a minimum, no god who cares about us), this life is all there is, death is an arbitrary happenstance.
2. There is a God, he cares about us, this life is just a small fraction of our existence, death sets us free for the next adventure.

Either position can be argued credibly. But mixing the two positions leads to confusion and nonsense. For example, arguing that the happenstance of death proves that God doesn’t care assumes the existence of God and the finality of death – and the two just don’t go together. Similarly, the argument that there is no (personal) god and that those who have ‘passed over’ are somehow still alive ‘on another plane’ seems to me to lack sense and logic.

So my first assumption is that position 2 is correct: there is a God, he cares about us, this life is just a small fraction of our existence, death sets us free.

The appointed hour

My second assumption is that each of us is in this world for a purpose. It may be that we have the gifts to do something great. It may be that something we do or say – or the mere fact that we have existed – will affect someone else so that they are prompted to use their gifts. It may even be, as Taylor Caldwell has her Lucifer complain, that God is increasing the numbers of the saved by creating ensouled humans and taking them home before birth.

And bring all souls to heaven…

My third assumption is that God wants us to be saved, and he wishes to take us home at the time and in the way that gives us our best chance of making a choice for him. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that everyone dies at the right time for them – because humans have free will, and can ignore God.

Evidence? It depends…

These three assumptions lead logically to the main contention in the headline that – if we listen to the promptings of God – we don’t die until we’ve finished what we came to do.

Evidence of miraculous healing is compelling to the person healed – perhaps even to families and friends – but easily discounted by those who don’t wish to believe. They can say ‘initial misdiagnosis’, ‘natural processes’; ‘unknown causes, but this kind of thing happens’, ‘investigator error/fraud’ etc, etc.

And miraculous escapes are even more easily discounted by reference to ‘coincidence’. But again, compelling to those who heard a voice telling them not to get on the plane, or felt an overwhelming urge to leave town the day before the earthquake.

 I’ve posted about the 60+ miracles of Fatima – fully attested miracles with before and after medical evidence. I’ve posted about the process used in the investigation of miracles for beatification purposes. I’ve also posted about one of my own experiences of a miraculous healing. But I’m convinced because I believe; I don’t believe because I’m convinced.

St Thomas, putting his hands in the side of Christ and touching the wounds on Christ’s hands, knelt and said: ‘my Lord and my God’ – but he was predisposed to believe. Otherwise, his response could have been to put it down to hallucination, wishful thinking, a trick by the other disciples, remarkably rapid healing on the part of someone not quite dead – or any one of a dozen other improbable but ‘natural’ explanations.

Similarly, the miracle healings I have observed may have other explanations – though in at least one case what happened was described to me by the highly qualified specialists in charge as ‘impossible’. But I believed in God, and so I believe I know the explanation.

Signs and wonders

The other main reason for divine intervention is as a sign that God is acting in the world – Jesus himself said this about many of the miracles he performed. Again, the sign is for those who already believe or who are disposed to believe. Those who are disposed to disbelief will not believe ‘even if someone were to come back from the dead’ (biblical ref). So the sign is not to convince anyone of the existence of God, but rather to say to believers, this event – this message – is from God.

There are several reasonably famous miracles that are clearly intended as signs, and that have investigated and written about both by those who believe and those who don’t. I’ll briefly talk about the Eucharistic miracle at Lanciano, the tilma of our Lady of Guadalupe, and the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima. I by no means wish to imply that these are the only signs and wonders we know of, or that a sign needs to be addressed to a mass audience. Most believers I know can think of an incident or two that they regard as God shouting to get their attention.

But these three are good examples of my contention that miracles prove nothing to those who do not already believe. All three have had many pages written showing how they are miracles, and equally many pages written showing how they are not. Note that Catholics are not obliged to believe in any of them. Some do; some don’t.

Jesus is the Bread of Life

Lanciano first. Thecontext is a time in the 8^th Century when there was a lot of debate about what really happens at the Eucharist. The story goes that a priest who doubted that the Eucharistic host became the physical body and blood of Jesus prayed for belief, and the host changed in his hands with part of it becoming flesh that dripped blood. Over a thousand years have passed, and the host from time to time is marched through the streets in procession. Scientific tests in 1971 found that the flesh is from the heart muscle and the blood is AB type. The researcher found no trace of preservative – the condition of the flesh and blood indicated they were drawn from a living person, not a corpse.

Believers claim: a miracle to support the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Unbelievers claim: fraud – both in the 8^th Century and recently during the investigation. By the way, the Internet claim that the 1971 investigation never happened is untrue.

Roses from heaven

Guadalupe is a place in Mexico. The context is the early years after the Spanish conquistadors. Most of the population is still pagan, and they heavily oppressed by the few, nervous, military occupiers. The story goes that in 1531 an Aztec convert meets a beautiful Aztec princess who tells him she is Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and sends him to the Bishop to ask for a church to be built where she appeared. After several trips back and forth, the Bishop asks for a sign. Mary gives the Aztec roses from the Bishop’s own Spanish province, and when the Aztec drops them on the Bishop’s floor, the tilma (poncho-style garment) he carried them displays an image of the Lady.

The tilma was made from cactus fibres and as such should have turned into dust after approximately twenty years. Instead it has survived and been on diplay to the faithful for nearly 500 years despite being exposed to the smoke of candles throughout the centuries. Infrared spectroscopy has confirmed the integrity of the image. The image on the tilma is composed of pigments that have not been identified by chemical analysis as being the product of animal, vegetable, or mineral dye. No undersketch has been identified below the painting.

The image has been subjected to investigation of various kinds repeatedly since the middle of the 20^th century. A claim that Juan Diego (the Aztec) never existed has been comprehensively debunked with historical records, including his death certificate.

Believers claim: a miracle to convert Aztecs and bring them under protection of the Church.

Unbelievers claim: fraud and gullibility.

Errors from Russia

The miracle of the sun at Fatima was the climax of a series of apparitions seen by three peasant children in Portugal. The context is the first World War, in the months prior to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Portugal has an atheist secular government and a radically atheist press. The local hierarchy first attempt to suppress the visionaries, but they insist that they are seeing visions and being given messages. The Lady they see asks for prayers and an act of consecration to prevent Russia from falling into an error that will contaminate the whole the world. The bishops ask for a sign, and are promised one for midday on 13 October 1917. For weeks prior to this date, the media ridicule this absurd claim. A crowd estimated at 70,000 to 100,000 people gathers to wait for the sign. After a heavy shower of rain, the clouds clear and the sun is seen to zigzag towards the earth. People report their wet clothes suddenly drying. This event is seen by atheists and believers; crowd control, press, and faithful; even people who are up to 18 kilometres away at the time. Different people see different things. A few see nothing. Nothing shows up on radar.

In a seven year investigation some years later, hundreds of witness testimonies were collected. A number of theories have been suggested to account for the phenomena. The suggestion that it was caused by gazing into the sun in a highly charged religious atmosphere doesn’t take into account the people who weren’t there and still saw the event. Several meteorological phenomena might account for some part of what was perceived, but each has been criticized as impossible or extremely unlikely in the given conditions. One researcher has suggested that the event was natural, but the fact that it had been predicted for that exact time was a miracle.

Believers claim: an event on the spiritual level which was seen by those who were open to seeing it – to convince people of need to act quickly to pray for the conversion of Russia. (It didn’t happen. The Bolshevik revolution did.)

Unbelievers claim: mass hysteria (even of those who weren’t actually in the crowd); staring into the sun; unexplained visual phenomenon.

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Realists and miracles

The Anchoress posted this quote from the Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky:

. . . but it seemed to me that Alyosha was even more of a realist than the rest of us. Oh, of course, in the monastery he believed absolutely in miracles, but in my opinion miracles will never confound a realist. It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles.
[…]
As soon as [Alyosha] reflected seriously and was struck by the conviction that immortality and God exist, he naturally said at once to himself: ‘I want to live for immortality and I reject any halfway compromise.’ In just the same way, if he had decided that immortality and God do not exist, he would immediately have joined the atheists and socialists (for socialism is not only the labor question or the question of the so-called fourth estate, but first of all the question of atheism, the question of the modern embodiment of atheism, the question of the Tower of Babel built precisely without God, not to go from earth to heaven, but to bring heaven down to earth.)”

Yes, exactly.

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