JOINING MIRACLES: secrets of navigating our limitless human potentials

Sometimes we speak loosely of "miracles.” Read the news and
few weeks will pass that we don’t hear of an "economic miracle,”
a "miracle comeback” in sports, a "miracle” catch, a miracle this,
a miracle that.

In short, in everyday usage, we tend to use the term "miracle” to
refer to events that are unlikely yet beneficial.

But even that usage seems mundane. Aren’t true miracles
amazing, impossible outcomes, like raising the dead, walking on
water, healing those who are beyond any natural cure, or, as
Moses did, turning a walking stick into a snake?

In religious traditions, miracles occur through the intervention of
the Divine into our world. The faithful refer to numerous miracles
in both the Old and New Testaments.

Millions of people each year visit Lourdes, Fatima and other
holy places in hopes of receiving a miraculous cure for illnesses.

Let’s take a fresh look. Just what IS a miracle?

Definition: "A miracle is an event or effect in the physical world
that deviates from the known laws of nature.”

Note the key phrase: "deviates from the known laws of nature.”
The known laws: does that suggest that there are other secret,
or at least unknown, laws within nature?

Perhaps so. Barely more than a century ago, people would have
scoffed at the idea of machines that fly, or machines that can
look inside our bodies enabling us to see bones, organs, even
tumors.

Now of course, "flying machines” are commonplace, and
medicine has not only X-rays but all the devices that followed the
first early X-rays.

The point? First, that these tools seemed inconceivable not so
very long ago, because they depend on technologies and
understandings that seemed impossible under the then-known
laws of how nature worked. They came about only because
visionaries pushed the limits and discovered the secrets that
opened the way to new possibilities.

Second, that more such "practical miracles” are waiting to be
discovered . . . and that will happen when the visionaries among
us now dare to explore, to test, to experiment, to push beyond
"what everyone knows is impossible.” Many more secrets are
waiting to be uncovered.

"But wait!” you might object. "You seem to be suggesting that we
can all work miracles, and I’m not comfortable with that because,
in my religious tradition, miracles are works of God.”

Ah, but in most of those cases, didn’t the Divine work through
humans? Is it not reasonable to think that God, the Divine, the
One, the Universe—whatever term you prefer—might, even
today, be ready to work through humans who are open to new
possibilities and new insights on the secrets of how the universe
works?

As St. Augustine put it 1600 years ago,

"Miracles happen, not in opposition to nature,

but in opposition to what we know of nature.”

Perhaps the Divine is waiting for us to be open to learning to tap
secret potentials that have been latent within us since creation.

Want to explore these ideas further?