What We Talk About When We Talk About Miracles

Sept 15, 2020 | By Serena Puang DC ‘22+1

In 2019, members of Bethel Church implored the world to join them in asking God to raise two-year-old Olive Heiligenthal from the dead. For six days, people gathered to pray, worship, and declare resurrection power over Olive, but she never woke up. 

Incidents like these and more everyday occurrences such as seemingly unanswered prayers for loved ones make it hard to trust accounts of miracles or even hope that they will come. Sometimes the seemingly unanswered prayer is waved off by the supplicant’s lack of faith. Alternatively, it is seen as proof that no higher being is listening. 

In times of crisis, many people, even those who don’t typically consider themselves religious, find themselves turning to a higher power for help. Due to COVID-19, the world has shut down, and maybe for the first time in our lives, we’re all praying for the same miracle: for this to end soon. However, for ages and especially now, there has been vast disagreement about what a miracle is.

We use the word “miracle” to describe an individual’s recovery from cancer, an unlikely but favorable outcome in sports, a vaccine that could stop a pandemic, and effective diets. Some understand life itself as a miracle while others claim that they never see miracles at all.

Even as a Christian, I struggle with the idea of modern-day miracles. Sure, I believe that God is constantly controlling events in our world, but I can’t help my skepticism when someone tells me about how they experienced physical healing after being prayed over. 

Despite my doubts, I still consider my own admission to Yale a result of divine intervention. But Yale has almost six thousand undergrads who come from an array of faith backgrounds and an even more diverse set of beliefs about what a miracle is. The person who sees miracles every day, the person who believes in miracles but never sees them, and the person who doesn’t believe in miracles at all live within a fifteen-minute walk of each other and attend the same school. 

Seeking to investigate this phenomenon, I started with someone who was more skeptical than I was. I caught up with John Mori, ES ‘20, in his off-campus apartment. Speaking from his oversized blue bean bag, he told me that a miracle is “something supernatural that cannot be explained by science right now” which humans deem valuable or good. 

John doesn’t believe in miracles, but while talking to him I realized that a conversation about miracles was impossible without talking about faith. John grew up attending a Chinese Christian church every Sunday in Marietta, Georgia. Back then, he considered himself a Christian, but now he’s agnostic. 

“The world is kind of a strange place,” he said. “Being atheist has this kind of positive claim of the power of science to explain everything existing in the natural world. There seem to be—” he paused for a beat, giving me the chance to take in the sounds of rush hour traffic in downtown New Haven—“a lot of strange phenomena.” To John, a belief in miracles implies the existence of a higher power that directs or causes them, a claim he doesn’t feel comfortable making. 

This caught me off guard. While I knew that my belief in God supports a belief in miracles, I never thought of them as inextricably linked. I wondered how he could say firmly that he didn’t believe in miracles while not being sure whether a higher being existed. 

Was this lack of belief in miracles sincere, or just a way of tabling the question? After our conversation, I was left wondering if he was more agnostic about the existence of miracles than he initially let on. But wasn’t I the same way? I profess to believe that God is all-powerful, but when asked if I believe He works miracles today, I’m filled with caveats. Not with people I know or in ways I can’t understand. Maybe in a different country, but not here. 

I wondered how far the link between a belief in God and belief in miracles goes. Christians aren’t the only ones who believe in miracles, and if miracles are tied to faith in a higher being, then how does someone’s perception of God (or lack thereof) impact what they think about miracles?

“Miracles are something that can’t be explained by laws of science or physics, something that had to be done by a higher power,” Ivana Bozic, a junior in Franklin, said. We were calling on Facebook Messenger a few days after Yale announced that we would not be returning after spring break. I was sitting in my childhood bedroom looking wistfully at a map of the world, and she was stuck in Peru due to border closures. 

Ivana grew up Serbian Orthodox in Chicago and considered herself religious until high school, when certain political positions of her church steered her away from organized religion. Now, she is spiritual with no specific religious affiliation. Instead, she believes that there is a higher power connected to love which all people can access. During our conversation, she spoke of her practice of manifesting—a process of creating high frequency vibrations to align yourself with the loving energy of the universe. 

“I’ve been trying to visualize myself having amazing things that I want or need,” she explained. “I just tell the universe ‘I know you can give me this, thank you.’” 

This might feel reminiscent of prayer, but she doesn’t believe that people should ask for specific outcomes: “I don’t think we have a lot of praying or manifesting power in other people’s lives,” she explained. “I don’t ask for very specific things but I always set out with the intention that I will get what I need.”

Like me, Ivana believes that a higher power has a bigger plan than we can conceive of. But Christians believe that prayer can be both general (submitting to God’s plan, even if we don’t know what it is) and specific. We’re called to ask boldly for specific healing or intervention from God—we just don’t always get them. 

This tension illuminates my own discomfort with miracles. At times, what I understand to be God’s work could also be explained by science or coincidence. At other times, I, and other Christians, pray specifically for things that don’t come. It’s easy to dismiss this with words like, “we don’t know God’s plan,” and, “His will be done,” but often, that doesn’t feel good enough.

This led me to Titilyao Mabogunje (HC ‘20), or Titi for short. She doesn’t share my skepticism. Instead, she sees life itself as a miracle. 

“As a child (and even now), one of the prayers I prayed was, ‘Thank you God for the miracle of sleeping and waking up,’” she said. “Just from a young age, I was exposed to how temporal life is. I remember being a child in school and one of my friends died of an asthma attack.” These experiences have convinced her of the sovereignty of God and reminded her of how little control she has over her own life. 

“I think that most of the things we consider to be ‘normal’ are somewhat miraculous and are happening by divine agency,” said Titi. She went on to explain that God created science, so scientific processes are all happening under the direction of God. In contrast with John and Ivana, Titi believes that a stipulation that miracles can’t be explained by science makes the question of miracles “more melodramatic than it has to be.”

Besides the everyday miracle of being alive, she’s also seen miracles of healing akin to the ones in the Bible. “This woman couldn’t walk and was in a wheelchair,” she said.“People prayed over her and she was able to walk that very night.” That definitely reaches out of my experience, but I want to believe her despite my skepticism. But what if you ask and the miracle doesn’t come?

“No matter what I do, God’s plans will still prevail,” she explained. “So even though I may desire certain miracles, ultimately miracles are not the goal of my existence.” She added that miracles often don’t come in the ways we expect. To her, miracles are just one of many tools God can use to accomplish His will or draw people close to Him. One of the biggest miracles is the fact that humans can be reconciled to God through Jesus’ death on the cross, an event that was completely contrary to people’s expectations. 

I had never thought of salvation as a miracle. Since I grew up going to church, maybe I took the idea of God becoming human, living a perfect life, dying on a cross, and rising again for granted. But if this really happened and people can access God because of it, it would be a miracle under any of the definitions I’ve heard so far. 

The initial act of reconciliation with God is only one part of the miracle Titi was describing. The other part is the ongoing transformation people experience when they turn to God. Over the years, I’ve seen this transformation as I have struggled with mental health issues. 

I thought I would always deal with frequent panic attacks, but through a combination of therapy, support from friends, and what I can only explain as divine intervention, I virtually never have them anymore. 

Others have experienced similar changes too. They have quit vices, forgiven the “unforgivable,” and remained confident even when the world around them was going crazy. Could it be that going to sleep and waking up is no less a miracle than any of that?

We seem to lack a common language to talk about the inexplicable. An individual’s miracle vocabulary depends heavily on their background, what ideas they were exposed to while growing up, and what ideas they’re exposed to now. For John and Ivana, miracles have to be inexplicable by anything but divine intervention, while for Titi scientific explanations are part of God’s miraculous work. Even if someone proved that Moses’ iconic parting of the Red Sea was nothing more than a conveniently timed tsunami, she would still think it was a miracle—God’s way of providing for the Israelites by causing nature to work to their benefit in their moment of need. However, there seems to be agreement that should miracles exist, they would point us to a higher being. 

Additionally, each perspective has to grapple with the fact that strange things happen which reach outside their experiences. For John, stories from friends who believe they have experienced miracles inspire a kind of “humility and a certain curiosity.” He can’t access the experience in the same way, but nonetheless, like me, he’s inclined to believe people. Ivana’s belief that the loving energy of the universe will give people what they need has to somehow be reconciled with the classic problem of evil, the question of why bad things happen in a world with an all-powerful, loving, and good deity, that has been plaguing people for ages. Each person’s understanding of what miracles are, in what contexts they can happen, and their implications has to fit in a world that often doesn’t make sense. 

As for me, perhaps I had the wrong metric of evaluation. I considered acts of healing somehow more improbable or miraculous than the idea that a perfect God outside of time and space would want company from a person like me. Perhaps the most impactful miracles are not the one-off acts of healing, but the life transformation that people experience when they turn to God. 

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