EXPECT A MIRACLE?
by Forrest Church
June 30, 2002
This morning I shall offer the second installment in what will be an occasional series of sermons on how to make yourself miserable. The premise underlying these sermons is a simple one. Prescriptions for happiness are like Trojan Horses. They look beautiful from the outside but are filled with enemy soldiers.
My point is a simple one. Precepts that promise happiness often instead frustrate it. When they don’t work (which is often), you feel worse about yourself than you did before your tried them.
Here, for instance, are just a few of the ways you can ruin you life.
Keep all your options open. Leave nothing to chance. Climb every mountain. Refuse to accept second best. Don’t take no for an answer. Dream the impossible dream. Treat your children like adults. Keep a stiff upper lip. Never speak to strangers. Discover your true self. Get in touch with your inner child. Follow your bliss. And don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. If these are too general for you, you can always buy a satellite dish, subscribe to Martha Stewart’s Living (or Martha Stewart’s Tip Sheet), and learn to play golf.
If prescriptions for happiness often breed unhappiness instead, logic suggests that the reverse may be true. Advice on how to make yourself miserable could brighten your day. That, anyway, is the operating premise of Dr. Church’s invaluable guide, How to Make Yourself Miserable: 50 Ways Only You Can Ruin Your Life. This morning, I shall offer tip number 45: Expect a Miracle.
It’s in our nature to pray for miracles, so much so that some of us only think to pray when nothing short of a miracle can save us. When a trap door springs beneath our feet, the first thing we do is pray for a net to break our fall or an angel to sweep down and catch us in her arms. The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev once wrote that every time we pray we pray for a miracle. "Every prayer reduces itself to this," he said: "Great God, grant that twice two be not four."
Sometimes, indeed, twice two is not four. A loved one awakens from an irreversible coma. Or the cancer riddling your body goes into sudden complete remission a month after the doctors have suspended treatment and sent you home to die. Such things happen just often enough that it would be foolish not to throw a Hail Mary pass with two seconds left and one’s life on the line. There is no shame in this certainly, any more than an atheist should have to apologize for blurting out, "God save me" when the roof caves in above his head. Whether or not God takes a hand in arranging the debris, the atheist, miraculously, may emerge unscathed, which is certainly worth the intellectual compromise of a final desperate prayer.
Since prayers for a miracle at times of mortal danger can’t make those who are hanging to life by a thread any more miserable than they already are, hoping for miracles like these falls outside the compass of my study. To expect a miracle, however, is a different matter entirely.
Begin with expectation itself. Expectation might best be described as premeditated resentment. The greater your expectations are, the greater your disappointment will be when they are not fully met. Since we often think to expect a miracle when something less than a miracle might suffice to work at least a partial cure for whatever ails us, such expectation thwarts possible improvements, guarantees future resentment, and insures that this resentment will be gargantuan.
Your husband is a slob. Expect a miracle. Your boss is incompetent, your daughter, self-absorbed; your car is a lemon; your credit cards are all maxed out, your bank account near empty, and the rent is due tomorrow. Expect a miracle. Surely there is something—not much perhaps, but something—you could do to rectify the negative equations of your existence, change your spending habits for instance, both how you spend your money and how you spend your energy and time. In dozens of little ways you might begin to balance your book of life. If you are particularly clever, you might even resign yourself to accepting those aspects of your life that will continue to be what they are and then chip away, with patient persistence, at your more tractable troubles. You have to admit, however, none of the little things you might do to improve your earthly lot packs the wallop of an honest to God miracle. So don’t do anything. Just wait. Gaze out the window. Go back to bed. Pull the covers over your head. Wallow in victimhood. And then, pretend you are an ostrich. Perfuming your despair with the perfect escape fantasy, expect a miracle.
Alakazam! Your husband will clean the house, take a long shower, put on his best shirt, forget about his stupid ballgame and take you to the theater. Tonight. Your boss will see the light. Your daughter will grow up. Instantly. Your car will be as good as new. And, resolving your insolvency, you will win the lottery.
This week the cash jackpot stands at 32 million dollars. Don’t reckon the odds (200 million to one). Simply expect a miracle. If you are really lucky, not only will you win, you won’t even have to share it. (Have you ever noticed that the first thing you do upon dreaming of winning the lottery is to hope that no one else selects the right number?)
Of course, you may actually win. Somebody will. Whoever wins will beat no less daunting odds, so it might just as well be you. No problem. For, perversely, the way the lottery tends to work, even the lucky people who win turn out to be miserable. For instance, if you think your family is disfunctional now, just wait until you win the lottery. At least when people die sitting on a fortune, they are not around to observe how their loved ones behave. Winning big in the lottery is like going to heaven and finding the place full of creatures from the bar scene in Star Wars. Before you know it, you will become one of them: shifty, furtive, paranoid, grasping for gold straws. Even your closest friends, the ones who prove their friendship by not wanting anything from you, will not be above suspicion. So you exchange them for a new set of friends: accountants, investment advisors, lawyers, bodyguards. Not only that, but years later, after your new spouse has left you and you file for bankruptcy, the little debts you had accumulated before you won the lottery will pale in comparison to those that remain in the wake of your misspent prosperity. Winning the lottery big is one of the best ways I know completely to wreck an otherwise halfway acceptable life.
Since you are not going to win the lottery (a safe bet, unless so many millions of people buy this book when it comes out that the overall odds shift in favor of at least one reader’s good fortune), such misery is moot. Again, no problem. The trouble one purchases by expecting a miracle almost always comes when the miracle doesn’t materialize. And not only does your misery come packaged in the form of anticipated resentment. Even more deeply it stems from overlooking—through the haze of your rose-tinted myopia—the one thing that might otherwise save you from the curse of wishful thinking. I call this thoughtful wishing: thinking to wish for what you already have, for what you can do, for who you actually are and who you hold it in your power to become.
It’s very simple really. If you are healthy, wish for heath. Anyone who is dying will tell you what a blessing health is and how rarely we give thanks for it while we are fortunate enough to possess it. There are millions of couples who can’t conceive children, so wish for children if you have them, no matter how much trouble they may cause you. As for all your other problems, wish for the sympathy of those who are concerned about your plight, whatever it may be. In fact, the main curse of expecting a miracle is that one ends up looking for a miracle in the only place a miracle is unlikely to be found, namely almost everywhere else but the one place where you pray it might appear.
The truth is, we don’t need to expect a miracle to experience the miraculous. Life itself is a miracle. Our very being is predicated against impossible odds, odds infinitely more daunting than winning the lottery. Going back to the very first human beings, all our ancestors lived to puberty, chose the only mate they could have chosen for us to exist, made love at the only possible moment and united the only possible sperm and egg to keep our tenuous prospects alive. Then go back a billion years further, all the way to the ur-paramecium. And back billions of years before that, hedging the earth’s bet on the combustion of gasses and the pinball of stars. A single, unbroken thread connects us to the very moment of creation. The Universe was pregnant with us when it was born.
Do we ponder these things? Or do we ask ourselves, "What did I do to deserve this?" and then, losing hope the minute life tempers our optimism, pray not to awaken to the miracle that is ours—that is us—but instead pray to be saved by a miracle that will rescue us from what is by replacing it with something that is not.
"The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. "What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. [But to the wise] a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables."
What is summer? This is summer: a miracle parceled out to us only a limited number of times during our brief, yet seemingly and misleadingly endless lifetime. As this summer commences, we could do no better than to ponder the poet John Donne’s reminder: "There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, . . . but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once." If this were our only taste of summer, of sultry days and verdant trees, of ice cream trucks and frilly frocks, would we not be amazed by how miraculous summer is? Would we not walk out of this church to embrace both it and one another, saying, "Look! Summer. Can you believe it? It’s a miracle."
Walt Whitman loved New York summers. "To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle," he wrote. "Every cubic inch of space is a miracle. . . .
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
With any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest.
Your husband may still be a slob, your daughter surly, your car decrepit, your boss an idiot, your bank account wobbly. Don’t give up on such things. They are real and difficult. They require your effort and forbearance. They cause pain. But to expect a miracle will only make matters worse. Besides, it’s not necessary. For the miracle has already been given to you. "He who has eyes, let him see," Jesus told us. And, in the Gospel of Thomas, to those who were looking for signs of the kingdom, he answered, "What you expect has come, but you perceive it not."
Amen. I love you. And happy summer.