GordoZone

This is a letter to my dear niece at 6YearMed. If you want the full background to this post, then read her August 2 entry. Please excuse how poorly edited this post is. Reading it is a bit like walking barefoot down a gravel driveway.

SPOILER ALERT: There are references to Santa Claus in this post. While tastefully written, there is still the possibility of unintended revelation. You’ve been warned.

My dearest niece:

I so very much recall first peeling away some of the veneer of miracles to see a bit more of what they’re made of.

I drew the conclusion that since:

A) all truth is God’s truth, and
B) miracles cannot violate the Law of God, and additionally
C) Jesus was quite clear that nothing, in faith, was impossible (Matt. 17); I concluded:

All miracles are no more or less than higher truths we do not yet understand.

Oddly, I encountered the same sense of loss you did when reaching this conclusion. My best explanation is that you are becoming Santa Claus.

-MIRACLES OR MAGIC?-

Where we have failed is that for most of our developmental lives we have erroneously equated miracles with magic (and yes, I do blame the church somewhat for this omission of understanding). Thusly, if we can fill our lack of understanding with what we call science or knowledge, we then believe it can no longer be a miracle.

Think about when you first discovered how a magic trick worked. After encountering that knowledge, any time you witnessed its performance – the exact same one you were amazed by earlier – you likely had some sense of oh, that old trick – I know how they’re doing that. Its primary purpose, which was to confound and amaze, had lost its value in your eyes. Now it’s passé and almost sad to watch. You may feel a tad superior to the folks still falling for it even if you also celebrate the joy of watching them experience it.

If I showed my functioning PDA to a member of a clan that had been geographically isolated for centuries, then it may initially appear as magic; but if I took the time to explain how it all happened, then eventually our pupil would come to understand that his use of the word magic actually meant a power I cannot understand and is beyond my current ability to duplicate. In fact, since I could not at this time explain how my PDA works, it’s still somewhat magical to me, but I know the reality is that there are just higher truths I do not yet know.

-DISSECTING THE WORLD-

I was forced to study the concept of a ‘book dissection’ in 12th grade English. This is the idea that you take apart the characters, plot lines, relationships, symbolism, etc., and study them both individually and in relation to each other. I complained loudly that dissecting a book ruined the whole thing for me – in reality I was just really, really lazy.

My teacher was prepared for this.

She said that unlike dissecting a frog, which ends up a dead pile of discombobulated bits, dissecting a book did no such damage. Dissecting a book allowed the reader to so much more richly appreciate the individual nuances and inner workings of a literary work of art. You were actually allowed to share more in the artistry of the book, reliving it as many times as you like, and more richly participate in the story when reading it. In fact, dissecting a frog still made you better appreciate how frogs, in general, work.

Needless to say, as a professional musician I learned music works the same way. The more I studied the technical and logical nuances of the master composers, the more I began to share in layers of joy, art, and intellect that I simply could not understand as a layman – reliving it more and more deeply as many times as I chose.

Science is, in effect, the dissection of everything. We, via both the hard and soft sciences, try to gain understanding of every aspect of the universe we can perceive. As we dissect the universe, we are more fully able to participate in the richness of God’s creation.

-FAITH AND SCIENCE-

For millennia faith and science walked beside each other down the path of life. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin were all men of faith as well as science.

By the early 20th century, though, we see a powerful and noted divergence that is only now beginning to heal. Unfortunately, for too many folks miracle meant magic, and when the understanding of how the trick worked came to light, the amazement faded away. Faith became passé.

Folks had placed their faith in the miracles, themselves, and not the living God by whom all things come to be.

I could write tons on this point alone, but I shall spare you.

-BEING SANTA CLAUS-

Our first understanding of Santa Claus is one of miracles. We believed in a person who magically gives gifts to everyone on earth in a single day for no reason. In the end, we were so very selfishly amazed.

As the veneer of this miracle peeled away, we discovered higher truths about the ‘miracle’ of Santa Claus. The magic is gone. The value of receiving unconditionally has faded into the higher truth of credit cards and secret stashes in the attic.

We then get our only joy in watching others less experienced than us continue to be fooled by the trick. For many, this is the end of the logical line. It’s never really magic, and it never was a miracle.

Eventually, though, most of us will, in fact, become Santa Claus. If there’s no miracle, then why does this meme of Santa Claus continue to pervade our society in both secular and religious contexts? The higher truth is that it’s not about the gifts, but the image of unconditional love and gift-giving that is easily understood by the very youngest of children. The joy and pleasure of being the miracle for those who have not yet reached a higher understanding of truth is infinitely greater than believing in the miracle. Once you’ve gotten to be Santa Claus, to be the miracle, why would you ever want to go back to actually only believing in the magic of the miracle.

Now, remember that Jesus Christ said we would be able to perform all His miracles and more. This never, ever meant that we’d become wizards of myth, but that one day we would work the same works on earth that He did. We would one day understand, in our finite bodies, some of the higher truths that He knew at that time without limit.

Need an example? Jesus miraculously cured lepers. Magic? You tell me. We can cure leprosy today. Is it any less a miracle just because we attained the higher truth of how to cure it? Sure, the ‘magic’ is mostly gone, but the miracle is there just the same.

Are you sick with leprosy? Well, here, eat some of this processed fungus we grew in a bowl. It’ll clear it right up.

Wow, you’re magic!

No, I just have a higher truth.

I know it’s a little more than that, but only by degree. My 71-year-old father had an emergency triple-bypass five years ago. I chatted with him on the phone just today. You can talk to me all you want about arteries, anesthesia, stitches, grafts, etc. To the medical professional, it’s the business of applying higher truths than I know. To me, it’s a miracle – even still a little magical.

Now, Jesus sometimes only touched folks or just spoke and they were healed. Miracle? Sure. Magic? Only because we can’t yet see how it all works.

I admit it’s hard to conceive that we could know the truth of speaking someone healed just like we know the truth about Santa Claus. Still, it’s what miracles are made of: higher truth – nothing more and nothing less.

If and when we do learn how to heal by speaking, I suspect it’ll be like anything else – we will no longer believe in it as magic, but we will embrace the truth as a daily part of our lives.

SOOOOO

Just like all aspects of our lives, as well as the myriad living cycles of the universe, the old has to pass away and the new comes into being. This is the nature of things, and it is good, right, and proper.

It is hard to become the miracle, as we believe a part of us has died off when losing the magic. It can make us jaded and cynical. God did ordain that this was good and proper and that we would see Him more clearly as we learned more (1 Cor 13) about the universe. It’s harder to see God when Santa is in the way, but when we become Santa we see that Santa was drawing us to God the whole time – we just had to believe in the magic first.

As the magic of Santa fades, we can see God’s glory just a little more clearly. As the magic of antibiotics fades, we can see God’s glory a little more clearly – we can be God’s glory a little more clearly.

So, when the miracle becomes the mundane, when the truth steals the innocence of magical amazement, just remember the following:

A) All truth is God’s truth, and
B) The new knowledge I possess does not violate God’s law, and
C) Miracles are nothing more or less than higher truths, therefore:

It is not me, but HIGHER TRUTH in me.

or better put

It is not me, but CHRIST in me.

While the innocence of magic was lost, this idea brought my faith to life more than anything else I ever encountered: the idea that knowledge and intellect – not passions or emotions or blind faith – is what brought me closer to God. This is, for me, embracing the MIND of God. Our church/spiritual life guides us in embracing the HEART of God. It is these two together that lead us to do amazing things. One without the other is very dangerous, indeed.

Albert Einstein 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.

All your sheep, in fact, are miracles.

And so are you, my dear niece.