So says Jerzy Buzek, head of the European Parliament. (There's a European Parliament? Who knew?) A plane goes down, killing everyone on board except a young boy, who has not yet been told that his mother, father, and brother are dead.
A miracle.
He'll grow up without his mom and dad, bearing survivors' guilt and God knows what else; in an instant, his life is changed for the horrible, forever.
A miracle.
A hundred people are dead, hundreds more grieving, kids without parents, parents without kids, futures erased by the stroke of an unseen hand. And a kid survives.
A miracle.
Because the god or gods that killed off a hundred, destroying hundreds more on the ricochet, decided not to kill one, but, rather, to leave his life in ruins, people see the hand of their deity and like what they see. But I wonder: which is the miracle, the killing or the saving, and why? God/gods must have been involved in each outcome, right? If he/she/it/they did the one, they most certainly did the other. If, as Ms Merriam Webster says, a miracle is "an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs," why is it the saving and not the killing? And what does it say about the god/gods who did it?
Well, that part is pretty obvious. What's not so obvious is why people find joy in it. I simply don't get it, and I can't imagine that I ever will. I do get why people need to put their eggs in a godly basket. I get that for most people, the capriciousness and finitude of life requires some sort of transcendent hedge. But coming up with an explanation that involves deeming such an event as this to be a miracle... who'd want to believe in such a higher power as that? Where's the comfort? Killing off a kid's family and breaking both his legs is a sign of deitific intervention? The deity they're down with? Yikes.
Their answer, I assume, is some variation of the basic theme: he/she/it/they work in mysterious ways. Giveth...taketh...blessed be... Which, really, is saying, simply, "Who the hell knows." With that, I'm quite okay: who the hell knows? And I wonder what the world would be like if everyone just accepted that truth, instead of their particular choice among all the disparate, internally and externally contradictory, hateful, destructive, rejectionist beliefs that seem to be destroying our planet and us. Accepting the uncertainty, what would it be if everyone settled on their own answers, let everyone else have theirs, and kept it all to themselves? Actually, I know what that would be:
A miracle.
