UNTIL last week, I hadn't realised that most miracles conducted by saints are executed posthumously. They don’t happen in the potential saint’s lifetime. Mother Teresa died in 1997, and her first miracle came a year later, when a 30-year-old woman in Kolkata said she had been cured of a stomach tumour after praying to her. Mother Teresa was beatified (the first step to sainthood) in 2003.
It takes two miracles to qualify for sainthood, and last week the Pope verified another by Mother Teresa: the spontaneous healing of a Brazilian man with brain tumours. She is expected to be canonised in Rome next September.
That Mother Teresa might apparently have had this impact should be no surprise. A Nobel Peace Prizewinner for her work among the poor, she had a popular appeal; over the years since her death, a great many people, one imagines, have probably prayed to her for intercession.
This isn’t to say that I do or don’t believe in miracles; just that perhaps in a world where a lot of people are praying for her help, the statistics aren’t so stacked against such a healing. Spontaneous remission is rare in cancer, but it happens. We are far from understanding the way the disease works, or how mind and body interact. Do we attribute such recoveries to the work of God? Or seek some other non-divine explanation?
Albert Einstein once, famously, said: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Theoretically I’m with Einstein, though it seems to me that the term "miracle" does occupy a particular place in modern secular culture. The miracle, in common parlance, is not “everything”. It is not the norm. It is the exception, the statistically highly improbable, the massive shift. It’s those events we have dismissed as so unlikely, that they are not worth considering as a possible outcome. And secular culture is as obsessed with these happenings as religion. It’s one of the reasons blogs like Freakonomics are so popular. We want to know why the things that don’t normally occur happen. We don’t need to be a believer to be fascinated by them.
We in the media love a good miracle too. Each year brings its own sprinkling of them: tales of survival, of astonishing cures, of hope where there is hardship. We saw this year, for instance, a young man lifted alive from the rubble of the Nepal earthquake after being buried for 80 hours, having survived by drinking his own urine. We saw a baby found in the wreckage of a plane crash in South Sudan, one of only two survivors when 37 had died. We heard of a Syrian toddler found floating, alive in the sea, fished out of the water by a Turkish fisherman. These stories provide light in the darkness. But they are also reminders of the broader statistics of risk and death that surround them, of those lost while a few survive.
Miracles, in other words, are what we cling to as comfort in difficult times.
Then there are the so-called “miracles of modern science”: the things we never thought possible, which go on to become the norm before we even can understand how. Of course, these days the launching of a rocket, and a British man into space, no longer seems like an almost divine marvel. But science, over the last year, has offered much to wonder at: the creation of the "three-parent" embryo, the re-engineering of the polio virus as a treatment for cancer, the devising of the technology to enable direct “brain-to-brain communication", and the development of eye drops that can melt away cataracts, allowing the blind to see again. The defeat of Ebola through a vaccination programme was another such miracle. Of course, some such miracles seem to pass unnoticed, because they have taken place over such a long time: one example here is the eradication of Polio from Africa.
Events that we call miracles take place, in fact, fairly regularly. As David J Hand, author of The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles And Rare Event Happen Every Day, has put it: “What we think of as extremely unlikely events actually happen around us all the time. The mathematical law of truly large numbers as well as the law of combinations help to explain why.” Or, in summary: if an event occurs often enough, even those things that are highly improbable will occur with some frequency. If enough ill people pray to Mother Teresa, perhaps one or two of them will recover.
According to one survey, only one in six people in the UK
believe in miracles. Most of us, however, are fascinated by these extremely rare events. To us, they seem like remarkable things. But, of course, as David J Hand points out, they are simply an everyday fact of life.
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