How To Believe in Miracles

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People thought the sun was spinning in the sky. Some of them stared directly into the blazing light. They hoped to see the Virgin Mary there. A local housewife named Theresa Lopez had had visions of Mary and promised an apparition. Six thousand of the hopeful stared up at heaven near Lookout Mountain. T shirts (MOTHER CABRINI SHRINE and FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION) sold for $20 each. The bottles of HOLY WATER, MEANS OF SPIRITUAL HEALTH were free.

Theresa Lopez said she saw the Virgin "wearing a gold gown . . . surrounded by pink, sparkling lights." Everyone else saw blue sky and stabbing sunlight. When the day was over, a woman named Kathy left the Mother Cabrini Shrine near Denver disillusioned. She had brought her two-year-old son, who is mentally and physically disabled, because she thought the Virgin would help him.

Now yellow and green dots danced before her eyes. A doctor told her that when she stared at the sun, she burned both her retinas and damaged the central line of her vision. "I go up there to pray with one disabled member of my family and come home with two," she said bitterly. "I'm done praying. In a way, I'm angry with God."

Denver's Archbishop J. Francis Stafford advised Catholics to stop going to the shrine in the hope of visions. He warned about unreliable "private revelations" and appointed a committee to examine the Lopez case.

The realm of the miraculous sometimes lies just across the border from the fanatical or the tacky. Miracles may turn into roadside tourist traps, Fellini scenes. A revelation may go commercial and look like a snake farm beside the highway in North Florida. The transcendent moment falls from grace and spoils on the ground like rotten fruit. So the territory of the miraculous must be approached carefully, by stages, passing from the gaudiest, shabbiest outer display toward what may, occasionally, turn out to be a deeper truth.

Even the most accomplished soul may be ambivalent about miracles. The Buddha disapproved of them. Once, by the bank of a river, he met an ascetic who claimed that after practicing austerity for 25 years, he was at last able to cross the river by walking on the water. The Buddha said he was sorry that the man had wasted so much time and effort: the ferryboat would take him across for one penny.

Still, the Buddha understood the theatrical possibilities. In his native city of Kapilavastu, the Buddha rose in the air, emitted flames and streams of water from his body, and walked in the sky. In order to convince his relatives of his spiritual powers, he cut his body into pieces, let his head and limbs fall to the ground, and then joined them all together again before the astonished audience.

A miracle is a wonder, a beam of supernatural power injected into history. Up There descends Down Here for an instant. The world connects to a mystery -- a happening that cannot be explained in the terms of ordinary life.