Regarding “Miracles” - Running from Horses?

I left my last posting with a Trinitarian stutterance: perhaps, perhaps, perhaps God loves us that much (to be born a baby in a stable, to come down and hang with us homies, so save us by showing us how to be human, and to introduce us to the God he invited us to address as he did – Father.)   That God would do that is what C.S. Lewis calls “The Grand Miracle.”  This morning in the crisp darkness, I finished the book, Miracles, that had sat on my “must read” bookpile for ten years since it had caught my eye on the bargain rack at Borders back in Detroit.  I bought it because of its author, and in spite of its subject. 

You see, I doubt miracles.

Despite this doubt, my admiration for Lewis had drawn me over those ten years to make exactly three attempts to read it, but I had given in to sleep or whatever was on my mind.  So the book had grown three bookmarks in the early pages, none of which had taken me in subsequent attempts to pages I had remembered having read. 

Perhaps it was one of Lewis’s refuted “special providences” that had led me to find Miracles in audio book format at the library, enabling me to listen to it on my morning walks this week.  This fourth attempt to get through the book was successful; on the snow-covered hilly streets, you see, I can’t nod off; I’d fall.  And I can’t stop reading and start daydreaming; the audio continues to play, pulling my mind along as if it were Lewis’s canine companion. 

While not being able to stop provides the advantage of persistence, it also has the disadvantage of making note-taking impossible, or at best impractical.  As a result, my mind gets as much exercise as my legs, accumulating and juggling concepts, images, and turns of language until I can get back to me desk and jot them down.

If the first gift of the book was to open my mind to the possibility (perhaps, perhaps, perhaps) of the reality of The Grand Miracle, the incarnation of God (in the crib with us homies), it was a particular image that, in the parlance of Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, “stuck” with me: running from horses. 

Gladwell says that what makes a message effective is its “stickiness”, that we remember something about it, and can’t shake it off.  But in this case, I was like half of the Velcro, waiting for the other half to come close enough to grab on.  I’d like to believe, you see.  While I continue to enjoy Karen Armstrong’s academic and dispassionate analysis of religion, there was something about Lewis that fit like old shoes, like an old sweater that had fallen back behind the closet that had a smell of memory, like an old song that took me to a time when I was somehow, in some way, more real, more authentic, more connected to mystery perhaps.

Lewis had spoken in the middle of the book of the connection of the spiritual to the natural being like the centaur, comfortable with both his spiritual and natural parts.  It had sparked in me a vague hope, or perhaps more honestly a hunger.    Like a Mahler symphony, he ends the book with a return to that theme, but in full crescendo, making a final plea for the reader to set aside a kind of lazy pantheism and put on faith, accepting The Grand Miracle for the true “Nature” that it is despite what we fear will be its blinding brightness.  

To shrink back before all that can be called Nature into negative spirituality is as if we ran away from horses instead of learning to ride…These small and perishable bodies have been given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys.  We must learn to manage: not that we may some day be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining, and world-shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King’s stable.

New Year's resolution suggestion: let's saddle up!