The Commonplace Miracle

"The commonplace miracle: that so many common miracles take place."

--Wislawa Szymborska

Yet, in Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska's words, the greatest miracle of all may be "the commonplace miracle: that so many common miracles take place."

Within our own religious tradition, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who was the greatest celebrator of the "commonplace miracle." Emerson, the son of a minister and briefly a Unitarian minister himself, became disenchanted with Christianity's focus on the "person" of Jesus and his supposed performance of miracles. Historical Christianity, he said, "has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons," Emerson told the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School in 1838.

Emerson was an early though quite modern proponent of God's impersonality, the idea that God was a force or power within all creation, including ourselves, rather than an external being or divine "parent."

Emerson was especially critical of the attempts, by most of his contemporaries, to base the validity of Jesus's teaching as well as his supposed divinity upon the miracles he was reported to have performed. Emerson believed that the reports of those miracles could never be verified, and he doubted that Jesus was any more divine than any of the rest of us. He believed that life, itself, was a miracle. Of Jesus, he said,

He spoke of miracles for he felt that man's own life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knows that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, "I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think."

Eventually, Emerson would abandon even his early belief in the uniqueness of Jesus's mission as the revealer of what was also in you and me. Other great religious prophets, particularly those he was discovering in his study of Eastern religious traditions, had also seen "with open eye the mystery of the soul." Anyone, through what Emerson and his Transcendentalist colleagues and friends called "self-culture," could aspire to the heights of perception that Jesus and others had ascended. Indeed, they would have said, we must.

Jesus thus became for Emerson primarily a model of what each of us is called to do. But he was clear that we must not copy merely; we must go our own way, expressing as Jesus had what is uniquely divine in each of us. "Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost," he encouraged the graduating seniors at the Divinity School, "--cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint [people] at first hand with Deity." Earlier he had told them, "Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imaginations of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil."

Emerson was perhaps the greatest prophet of the neo-Platonic ideal of the "spark of divinity" within each of us. The favorite biblical quotation among the 17th century English neo-Platonists was taken from Proverbs 20:27 (King James Version): "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord."

What was most important in religious experience was our own personal experience of the Sacred. Particularly for anyone who would be a preacher or teacher of religion, it was necessary to speak and teach from our own deep experience of and encounter with the Divine.

In Emerson's view, Jesus became totally unnecessary in this process, and, other than showing us a way, even irrelevant. The miracles of Jesus, especially, could prove nothing, and the only important thing was that his experience rang true to the potential that is already in each of us, also.

For Emerson, as for the poet Szymborska, the true miracle was the commonplace one: what he calls in his Divinity School Address "the blowing clover and the falling rain." Revelation is not sealed once and for all, even in a book as sacred as the Bible, but is open and continuous. One need only turn to great Nature, which for Emerson meant not only the natural world outside, but our human nature inside as well. As Shakespeare had written in As You Like It, there are "books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." New truth lies waiting to be discovered, new prophets to be born.

Emerson would have completely agreed with Szymborska, and particularly with her closing "extra miracle, extra and ordinary": that "the unthinkable can be thought."

Indeed, Emerson's whole career was an argument in affirmation of change and innovation and of what he called "genius," by which he meant the way in which God--the divine or as he usually preferred to name it, "the Over-Soul"--uniquely acts through each and every one of us. Each of us, he would have said, has the ability, if we would cultivate what is true to us, if we would develop our own deepest and most authentic selves, to bring something fresh and new into the world: "the unthinkable," only because it has never yet been thought. Only you, only I, can give the world what is unique or "true" to us, and which, he would have argued further, the world desperately needs.

Looked at in this way, each of us is precious and irreplaceable, for each of us contains something that no one else possesses. Each of us has experiences and ideas and thoughts which only we, of all the people in the earth, will have. This, Emerson would have said, is the greatest miracle of all,--if only we had eyes to see and ears to listen and hear.

It was his affirmation of our potential for greatness that people responded to when they heard Emerson lecture and preach. He brought them, and us, still further along from out of the black cloud of human depravity and Calvinist predestinarianism which his elders, particularly William Ellery Channing, had only recently begun to lift. He helped to free western religion and religious experience from its dogmatic Christian trappings, and liberated us to begin the search for religious truth on our own; and thus he has had and continues to have a profound influence on Unitarian Universalism and other liberal religious movements down to our own day.

Emerson was perhaps the greatest believer in the commonplace miracle that we have yet known. He would have shared completely Szymborska's awakening to the miracle of "the inescapable earth." It is inescapable in both the negative and the positive senses. There is no longer someplace else for us to go. We are stuck here, in all of our paradox and ambiguity, in all of our good and evil, our love and our hatred, our peacefulness and our violence, in all the times and seasons of our being. Here is where we are, for better and for worse. Here, in this world, and not in some other, is all we can love and all we can hope for.

If only we could see it that way, on this day and on all the other days of our lives. What if we truly lived as if this "inescapable earth" was all that there is? What if the peoples who inhabit this beautiful green planet really came to understand that it is here or nowhere? What would this mean to our treatment of one another and of the good earth itself?

Perhaps this is the unthinkable thought of which Szymborska speaks at the end of her poem. She is not naive about our chances. Writing in another poem ["The Turn of the Century"], she wrote,

Whoever wanted to enjoy the world
faces an impossible task.

May we be alive to the all the miraculous possibilities of this holiday season, to its promise, and even to its reality in our lives, today, tomorrow, and always. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock