​ 
             There it was, awesome, profound, the greatness of the Great.  For ten thousand feet I saw it disappear into the clouds, its slender point only six feet from the ground.  The ancients wrote that it was once a mountain, until the Great upturned it as if cleaved from the ground with a razor, and set it to spin, gyrating in profound silence one turn every hour, year after year, century after century.  They say it was to redeem Man, to bring him back to the age of Adam, but it did no such thing.  We witnessed its wonder with our tour guide and heard fairy tales of its origins and the miracles that were performed before it.  Imagine that, we said, an upturned mountain spinning on its top raised six feet from the ground.  Imagine, that our sciences have no explanation for it. 
 
                So we let our imaginations soar for fully thirty minutes, taking pictures and discussing it in wonder.  We had all heard about it, read about it, were taught about it since our earliest childhood.  Now, finally, we had seen it, for the price of seven thousand dollars, tips not included.  We would send our pictures back to home to friends and family, then return ourselves to our jobs, to our fears and our loves and dislikes, just as before.  Someday the puzzle would be solved, we were sure, but for now, we had lives to live and bills to pay. 
 
             That was the conclusion we came to.  In the beginning, we asked, “Why, if Jesus were both fully man and fully God, he did not make miracles so big and so lasting that no one could deny God’s existence?”  My picture of such a miracle was this eternally spinning upturned mountain.  Who, I said, could deny it existed?  Who could say that it was understood?  Who could then be a blind materialist barricaded behind the walls of practical science? 
 
Everyone had answers almost immediately.  Many pointed to belief: how would such proof cajole the faith we should have without miracles, without living wounds in the hands and feet and sides?  How much more worthy are those who believe but do not, after all? 
 
I myself joined in, having just read the book, Out of the Silence, written by a survivor of the (in)famous Andean mountain crash, where Uruguayan school students survived 72 days of winter in the high mountains after their plane crashed by eating the dead.  Said the author, Eduardo Strauch: he would go outside the plane fuselage in the bitter cold to witness the quiet of the mountains and have profound glimpses of the eternal.  Here his visions would transcend the fearsome glory of the high mountains, where even such awesome views would be dwarfed by an internal vision of the eternal, where everything but the radiant greatness of the unity of all things palled as if nothing.  That, I thought, was the reason: that however awesome and miraculous material things might be here, they could never touch the wonder behind everything, that which exists beyond the veil of creation. 
 
There was also the jaded nature of humanity itself to consider.  Said one, “They would find a way to say that this miracle was no miracle at all, just a natural phenomenon that had yet to be explained.”  That is undoubtedly true, as we have yet to understand the beginnings of “being” to this day, and probably never will. 
 
   Still, I must be honest and wonder out loud if we, this group of mine, are only telling Just-So stories; that is, stories that take a fact at hand and then lend any explanation to them that serves a certain end.  We see that in the foolishness of gender orientation now going the rounds, or of the attribution of everything to race relations, or economic relations, or whatever scratches the itch its inventors.  Could it be that we, Christians, are doing the same?  Could it be, then, that Jesus, even with the help of his supposed father, could not do such great miracles as to turn a mountain upside down?
 
    We know, for instance, that there were many wonder-workers in his era.  Whether genuine or not, people believed.  None had risen from the dead, and it is hard to believe that the many people who were said to have witnessed Jesus’s post-death presence were willing to die horrible deaths for a lie, but who knows for certain?  Wouldn’t it have been better if Jesus had parted the seas?  True, Mosses was given to do this, but there were not impartial scribes to note that this happened.  Couldn’t Jesus, then, have parted the seas before the Roman historians of the day, ones who wrote from a near-modern rational perspective and would have no reason to lie about the miracles worked by a Jew from far-off Israel?  Or, what the heck, why didn’t he have simply turned that mountain upside down and set it to spin until the Second Coming? 
 
            We must go back to the beginning of this essay for the best answer.  Miracles happen all the time, from spontaneous healings to true visions of the future to levitations witness by thousands (many of them contemporary and even skeptical scholars).  Still, we do not believe.  The source of creation is still a mystery, and if it were to be solved with a new physics, this new physics would make our world an even stranger and more inexplicable place to us than it is now.  And still, we act as if all is normal, that reality, if not human issues, operates on an even, if not boring, keel. 
 
            It’s not as if the spiritual world does not give us a boost now and then.  In the village of Medjugorje, which I visited four or five years ago, it is said that when the last of several visionaries there have the last of so many promised secrets given them, the power of the universe will erect (or install or create) a physical structure or thing that will defy scientific explanation, both as a mark of the reality of God and as a warning, that a certain time in world history has come to be. 
 
            I would love the former, the structure or whatever, and fear the latter, the warning.  Could it be true that this will come to pass?  But then again, can we imagine that even then, the forces of materialism would concede? Many miracles happen in Medjugorje to this day, after all.  Wouldn’t they just build just-so theories that, while eternally unprovable because they are untrue, would suffice the world enough so that most would still not believe?   
 
            Yes, and for this and the other reason given, faith, no spinning mountain was given us.  It would not only be explained away, as is our very creation today, but, even if believed, would not give us the knowledge that we need to transcend our limited view of the world.  The spinning mountain might even hinder our search.  Simply knowing that God exists should not give us reason to not try to know the unknowable.  In the trying we express our faith, and in the unknowing, we are given, in many ways, to know. 
 
  It is this other kind of knowing that is so important, and because it is different, even paradoxical (knowing the unknown), it cannot be given us by conventional means.   Miracles will only open us to other possibilities for a while, a good thing but not the thing itself, that is, the knowledge that we seek.   So, we cannot depend on miracles.  A good teacher would know this and not tie us to the initial shallowness of these wonders, which might anchor us to the shallow vision we have of the world.  We cannot leap from simple addition to calculus.  We need something else first, and only our good teacher can tell us what. 
 
            Still, wouldn’t it be grand, a mountain spinning upside down on an invisible axis year after year, century after century?  It would not tell me that God is involved in our individual lives, or that God is in all things and all things are ultimately united in love, but still it would be so cool.  Maybe we will get that in Medjugorje.  But maybe it would be better to let things be as they are, for the price of such a thing is said to lie in the harshness of a great chastisement.  Maybe it would be better to simply look at you, oh twinkling star, and wonder, wonder, what you are?   
 
                                                                                   
 
                
 
                                                                                     
 
                                                                                   

​ 
There is nothing more appealing to me than a good – that is, a GOOD – miracle movie as taken from fact.  This was not always the case.  In my mind, they swirl about me in memories in black and white, with too much acting and too little action-hero action, but that was when I was a child and did not understand.  Why would I?  The world was then an odd place of miracles and God-knows-what, so who cared about another miracle movie which was not as cool as John Wayne once again winning a war. 
 
Today it is far different.  As much as I would like to, I do not readily believe in miracles, let alone that life is a miracle.  No, I am too grown-up and world-weary to be snookered by the likes of Rev. Jim Jones in Kool-Aid, Guiana, or his more benign movie version, Elmer Gantry.  But, yes, I would like to believe, because I have good reason to: it is a world of miracles.  It is clear to me that I have just closed my mind to this. 
 
That is why I like miracle movies, and with some research, have come to appreciate them so much more.  They depict the real things, witnessed by hundreds if not by thousands, and there is no reasonable position to take against their reality.  And if they are real, so can be many other things, including God himself.  
 
So it was that on a sultry, too-hot day a weekend or two ago, I recalled that a new Fatima movie had been recommended to me by several people.  We looked for it on Netflix, and there we had it – popcorn-time in a house with air conditioning whose constant whir would conceal any calls from outside to “get to work now, the weeds are taking over!” Ah, such joy.
 
The movie is called, simply, “Fatima” (2020), concerning the well-known miracle at Fatima, Portugal in 1917, where tens of thousands, including Marxist skeptics, saw and, stunningly, believed, at the ‘Miracle of the Sun.’ There was much more to Fatima than that solo climax, and in this take, the movie moves us through the events of the three children and their visions through the probing of a professor in the 1980’s or 90’s as he interviews the most famous of the children, the by-then very old nun by the name of Sister Lucia (now Saint Lucia). 
 
The professor’s presence is a good device.  He voices many of the skeptics’ criticism (in hind-sight), including the misplacement of the stigmata – the blood wounds of the crucifixion – that St. Lucia was brought to bear.  Why, asks the professor, are the stigmata on the palms of the hands, when it is well-known that the nails were put through the wrists so that the body would not tear lose? Answers Lucia calmly, “Professor, I do not pretend to understand everything.  I can only tell you what I know has happened.” 
 
With that simple statement, she puts the problem to the fore: what happened really happened, even if it cannot be explained.   What we are talking about is a reality that is different from normal reality, but every bit as real – if not, as all the visionaries say, more real than real.  If those like the professor do not wish to believe, that is their business.
 
That, in a nutshell, is also the business of the quotidian world, which frames the problem that we as a species have had since well-before formal history (if paleo-archeology can tell us anything).  What we see with the meeting of the professor and St Lucia is the meeting of our daily world with the greater world highlighted by miracles.  In this, two problems are brought forth: one, that we cannot see the miracle of daily life, and two, that when life is undeniably brought into the realm of extra-ordinary miracles, that some, perhaps most, people will simply not believe in them anyway, no matter what. 
 
At the time of the death of Christ, the Holy of Holies –where God’s presence was supposed to reside, and did at the time of the Ark of the Covenant – was traditionally separated from the rest of the Temple in Jerusalem by a large, thick curtain.  Only a very specific Jewish priest could pass through that curtain, and only at a certain time of year after strenuous preparation.  Otherwise, to stand in the presence of the Lord meant instant death (see “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Hey, it had to have some truth in it).  After Jesus gave up his last breath, it was reported that a great earthquake shook the city and caused the curtain to tear in two.  The idea, for the disciples and later Christians, was that through Christ, the separation of Man from God could now be bridged by all.  The curtain was no longer impenetrable.
 
It was this that is exemplified in the movie.  The curtain has been removed (temporarily) through the miracles, but still we refuse to see.  Special miracles, ones meant to defy natural laws, have been and are sent to us to let us know that the door, or curtain, to God lays open if we only allow ourselves to see.  The professor has all the information on the miracles, including the Miracle of the Sun, as well as the most famous among the children visionaries at his disposable.  In her he finds a woman that is not only sane, but especially clear-headed, even brilliant, despite (or especially because of) her lack of formal learning.  She is sincere, lives in cloistered poverty, and has absolutely nothing to gain through her telling of her experiences.  Yet he still remains not only skeptical, but unmovable.  He will never believe.
 
So it was that Doubting Thomas became a lesson to us all, because he, after seeing the miracles of Jesus in his life and having lived with his fellow disciple for three years, would not trust that they had seen the resurrected Jesus.  At some point, this episode of the Gospels tells us, we must rely on the observations of others.  Most of us will not experience extraordinary miracles just as most of us will not fly to the moon, but at some point, we must give in to trust.  When this trust regards the supernatural, our trust becomes what is called ‘faith.’
 
With that, with this trust, the whole world could change, and I speak not only of Christian themes.  What we have here is something universal: the presence of a veil in our minds that keeps almost all of us from seeing not only special miracles, but the miracle of daily existence.  As Wordsworth reminds us in his poem “Intimations of Immortality”, we are born with the curtain partially drawn, but with the development of mature thinking, this curtain is almost completely closed.  The Apostles, we are told, were to have minds as open as children even as they were to be wise as serpents – that is, they were not to be fooled by the Elmer Gantries of the world, but still remain open to the infinite wonders of God in all creation. 
 
So it is in part why supernatural miracles still occur to this day – and for Catholics, they are occurring more and more frequently by the decade.  This is a good thing, in that we understand that the God of All is still interested in us, but also a bad thing, as it highlights our need for miracles because of our increasing resistance to the miracle of life.  We are desperately in need of innocent openness to believe and are being offered ever greater opportunities to do so, even as we increasingly refuse to believe.  If it was so hard for Thomas, how much more for us? 
 
When I was in the Marian miracle town of Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I not only witnessed minor miracles, such as rainbows around the sun and the sudden burst of the scent of roses, but was also given a locution – a verbal message – that seemed to come from Christ himself on the night before we left for America.  In this, I heard, “It is so hard for you to believe now.  How much harder when you are gone?”  Which could have ended, “How much harder when I (Jesus) am gone?,” a message clearly directed to the doubting Thomas within me.  Like Agent Mulder of “The X Files,” I want to believe, but like his skeptical partner Scully, I cannot ever fully do so, regardless.  The miracles come again and again, as they come to us all in one way or another throughout our lives, but still we are trapped behind the curtain.   For Christians, the way through the door is belief in Christ; for all of us, the way starts with a belief in a greater reality beyond the curtain. 
 
We all had this vision once.  We can all have it again.  For me the prodding to reopen my eyes often comes through miracles, the more the merrier.  The more I need, however, the less merry it shows that I really am, but I am willing to concede my spiritual poverty in order to gain it back.  
 
Close the curtains, then, and turn on the miracle movies, so that someday the curtain may be opened and the need to see them will vanish in the light. 
 

​ 
I have a lame excuse – I ask no pardon for the pun – if this essay is shorter than the usual four pages or so: my back hurts.  A lot.  This is probably because I have been traveling like a maddened albatross these last few months, but it happened so suddenly that I don’t really know the reason why.  But there it is – one move to the left or forward and, zing! – I nearly shriek like the princess sleeping on the pea and fall to the floor.  We are hoping for a quick resolution.
 
Perhaps I should not.  Just yesterday I received the “zing” as I was walking with my wife, bringing out the old speculation about the nature of pain.  Why must we have so much of it?
 
A year or so ago I read about a woman in England who has no sense of pain.  Apparently she is not numb and can feel everything except for pain.  Naturally, she is covered with scars, mostly those from burning, but the article reported to us that she is perhaps the happiest person that the reporter had ever met.  With no pain, there has been no trauma.  Imagine a life without that dark background of pain from youth and how trusting and calm one might be with life in general.
 
However, this woman lives in a protected environment where large fires and wolves and sharp rocks and murdering tribes do not invade her life.  We can understand that without pain, we would not have survived as a species.  The trouble is, why do we have so much pain?  Why must a tooth hurt like hell for days on end, when its demise will not kill the sufferer, and when the only remedy for it in the past was forceful removal?  Why must a ruptured appendix continue to torture us when, in the past, the only remedy for it was inevitable death?  These facts of life do not point to pain as simply a warning system meant to keep us out of danger.  Rather, they make it seem more like a nervous system scheme set to torture us, and sooner rather than later. 
 
On greater thought, as I walked along waiting for another zing to turn me from bold warrior to fairy-tale princess, an idea slowly formed through the haze that excessive pain was, in fact, just as necessary for human life as “warning” pain was.  This is not for physical reasons, but for reasons concerning what it is to be human.
 
Dogs don’t need excessive pain.  There has long been an argument concerning animal pain, whether or not it is real pain or ephemeral, and I think we – or at least we dog lovers – can safely say that dogs truly do suffer.  However, I would argue that their suffering is different from humans, in that it is not surrounded by the context of dimensional time and by comparative abstractions.   Such is a mouthful, I know, but if I can put it more simply, it means that humans linger over pain as something to remember, as something to live, and as something to anticipate.  Animals have memories of pain, too, as Pavlovian training can tell us, but for the most part, animals are almost entirely in tune with the moment.  Pain for them exists as a point in time only, not as a lingering state of discomfort or living hell.  So for humans, pain turns from a single sensation in time to an extended idea of pain. 

​There are many examples of how we as humans view pain differently.  For one, an animal will never purposefully kill itself to end its pain.  Humans do not do so in great numbers, but in great enough numbers to mark ourselves as different.  For animals, then, the instinct for self-preservation is never overcome by an internal dialogue that weighs the value of life with pain against the value of death without pain.  We, however, can think ourselves into pulling the trigger or drinking the poison.  That is either a great blessing or a great curse, but it does point to another difference between animal pain and human pain and how we might deal with it.
 
On the natural level, pain for humans more often than not makes normal life seem better, not worse, exactly because we can hold comparisons in our mind.  For someone in chronic pain, the memory of life without pain brings forth the inner beauty and joy of regular life.  The sufferer might think, “What a fool I was!  I had it so good,” much as we oldsters say, “Youth is wasted on the young!” (Which, speaking of pain, is painfully true).  There then becomes the hope that we might someday return to that state that we once took as a ho-hum, and how filled with gratitude we would be for that pain-free state of life. 
 
This, gratitude, brings us to another level where pain actually enhances life.  So many of the saints – maybe all of them – either suffered enormous amounts of pain beyond their will, or willfully brought it on themselves.  Just as living with pain might bring us gratitude for life without pain, so many have learned that living with pain might bring even greater – even supernatural – gratitude for the promises of eternal paradise. 
 
There is a little glitch in the logic here, I know: eternal life is an abstraction, something that separates us even more from the animals, and even from ourselves, for many do not even believe that this concept is sane.  It might be that for some, the afterlife might exist entirely in their heads, perhaps even in a psychologically unhealthy way.  However, that often does not matter.  In some cases – in many, many cases I would argue – long-lasting pain brings a greater sense of the holy to those who had not previously even considered the reality of the sacred.
 
I have written about Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist who found enlightenment in the suffering of the Nazi death camps in WWII, but he is not alone in finding spiritual knowledge through suffering.  The book Alive claims that each of the survivors of that long winter on the top of an Andean mountain found a special, supernatural relationship with God.  I, too, have experienced that on a personal level through some long-standing pain and have witnessed it in many people dying of old age.  There often comes a softening and a sense of mercy, of forgiveness, to many suffering souls, as if they now understand our common plight as humans; as if they now understand or are beginning to understand what it means to ‘Love one’s neighbor as oneself.’ 
 
It is true that understanding growth in spiritual life through suffering is not always easy to grasp.  Of course not: nothing on the supernatural level is easy to grasp as long as we are on the natural level.  However, there is a correlation here between the natural and the supernatural, just as there is the lived experiences of many millions who would agree with the concept of spiritual growth through suffering.  And, although this growth does not only happen to Christians, this phenomena does help us to understand better the value of Christ’s suffering for us.  Just as our suffering might bring forth more compassion for others and a greater sense of the spiritual, so the suffering of the son of God might bring forth a more thorough compassion for humanity in all its sin and misery.  What appears to be a mystery beyond humanity, then, might instead be a mystery that also lives within the human soul. 
 
This then - this compassion we gain through suffering - is something that is shared with us by God.  It is also something that further sets us apart from the animals.  But still I beg: God, heal my back!  Suffering is the one gift that gives us more than most anything, but is also the one that most of us would rather return to sender, or exchange for something that fits just a little more comfortably.