Negative Miracles

June 4, 2000

I guess that I had better come right out and say it at the outset: I have always been a cautious believer in the supernatural. While I would admit that my skepticism does sometimes diminish the possibilities in my life--some of the most exciting possibilities, at that--it has also saved me from not a few irrational fears. I don't spend a lot of time, for instance, worrying about hell and damnation. With my Universalist ancestors, I would agree that there is more than enough of that in what we call "normal" life. And I don't believe in ghosts, at least not in the traditional sense, though I confess that I am haunted by the past. Forget werewolves and other monsters--there are monsters enough to be found in the brilliant light of the everyday and the banal of this world.

Much as I would like to be able to heal the sick, give sight to the blind, and raise the dead, I recognized fairly early on in my career that these were not powers that had been given to me--at least, not in the literal sense. Scholars actually doubt that they were given to Jesus, either. I'm not terribly hopeful about the possibility of life after death (one of my favorite episodes of Monty Python is an interview about life after death with the late Archbishop of Canterbury). But as I have said on numerous occasions, I am a firm believer in life after life. And since I am a big believer that death is not the worst thing that can happen to any of us in this "vale of tears," having faith in life after life is pretty significant.

Which is just to say, you have much more reason to be worried about what might happen to you in this life than in the next.

One of the greatest natural miracles is that we survive life at all! Given the myriad microbes that can attack us, the thousand diseases we might contract, it is a miracle that we have any health whatsoever. Given life's inherent sadness, tragedy, and inevitable loss, it is a miracle that we pick ourselves up after even the most gentle bouts with it.

And besides, I have pretty much found that life is a miracle in itself. That's why I often encourage us to give thanks for it. Life is the greatest gift; it is the greatest miracle of all. The natural world is teeming with miracles: the sunrise is a miracle; people and animals are a miracle; love is a miracle; language is a miracle. The mystery of existence is a miracle. I don't need life after death to provide me with a miracle: I'm surrounded by it every single day of my life. Trouble is, I sometimes forget to notice.

Of course, it's easy to call the good stuff a miracle. I survived the accident--must have been a miracle. I won the big game--must have been a miracle. Never mind that it was just blind luck or hard work (and perhaps a bit of natural selection) that made those miracles possible.

But what about the bad stuff? This is where that kind of reasoning always breaks down. The miracle didn't happen--must be something wrong with me. How could God do this to me? What did I do to deserve this?

Wait a minute, what if I wasn't meant to win? What if the universe doesn't even care about my winning or losing? What if I, or someone I love, didn't survive the accident? Many years ago, now, at a time when I was undergoing some youthful personal struggles, a colleague suggested to me the notion of a "negative" miracle. Huh? How can a miracle be negative, I asked. Well, at the time it never is, he said. It's only after the fact that we realize something we perceived as being bad, perhaps even just about as bad as things can get, was actually good: a miracle; a negative miracle. Tell me more, I said.

As I understand it, negative miracles are not about redemptive suffering, at least not in the supernatural sense. There is nothing inherently good about pain. I do not believe that God sends us only what we can take, and not a jot or tittle more. Some people get way more than that, far more than anyone deserves, and more than anyone can stand. I do not believe that God has a plan in which I survive the car accident, and you don't. I don't buy that. I don't think that suffering is good for any of us, at least not in a divine or cosmic sense.

Suffering is simply a reality of the natural world of which we are a part, a part of the natural processes of life itself. It is not valuable in and of itself. It is only valuable because of what we might do with it. And what we do with suffering, and loss, and death, is pretty amazing. A miracle, actually. A negative miracle.

I have seen it happen on many occasions. People make meaning out of the most horrendous experiences of life: war and pestilence, death and dismemberment, failure and loss and unrequited love. Mahler wrote his beautiful Kindertotenlieder, Songs on the Death of Children, out of his grief over the death of his own daughter. That he did so is a miracle. Out of death, life, and comfort to others who may be experiencing the same kind of loss.

How much great literature and music and art is the result of great suffering? Is the suffering redemptive in an of itself? No, it is what we do with it--always what we do with it.

What we do with it wouldn't be so very important, except for what it provides to those traveling the dark journey with us. For it is a comfort to know that we do not suffer alone. We are not the first, and we shall surely not be the last, where suffering is concerned. And that is a miracle, even if it is a negative one. Solidarity and community seem to thrive more in the bad times than in the good. I wish it weren't so, but there it is. Joy can be shared, but suffering is the great leveler. Success can be shared, but loss is universal. And as Charles Stephen pointed out in the morning's reading, the sooner we learn that lesson, the sooner we learn how to lose, the better off we shall be.

My son had a wonderful experience this winter. His basketball team won the state championship. It's the kind of experience that builds memories for a lifetime. The losers, a group of boys from Hopedale High School, were gracious in defeat. They admitted that they had been bested by a superior team.

Not to take anything away from our boys, but I wonder who in twenty years will have learned the most from their experience--the winners or the losers? I would hope that the winners would recognize how lucky they were to achieve their goal--even with all of their talent and hard work. But I suspect that the losers may have learned a more important lesson for life, a lesson called humility. When we're winning, it's all too easy to think we deserve it. Which, maybe so, maybe no.

I know that sounds awfully Puritanical of me, swiping defeat out of the jaws of victory, but John Calvin wasn't wrong about everything. He realized that life doesn't always work out the way we expected it to, and that we had better stay humble in victory as well as in defeat. What we do with either is what is ultimately important, not only for ourselves, but more importantly for those around us. Even the bad things can turn out to have been a miracle--a negative miracle, but a miracle nonetheless.

Probably death is the most common form that negative miracles take. It has been said, with wisdom, that life would be meaningless without death, that the knowledge of our impending death is what drives us to accomplishment, that the knowledge of our limited time here is what forces us to take life seriously.

Death can also be a crystallizing factor in our lives. It all depends on what we do with it. I would not be who I am or where I am today if not for the negative miracle of some significant deaths along the way.

But there are less final negative miracles than the death of someone we love. There are those little losses of everyday, and those experiences which, while they are happening to us, seem to have no redeeming value, but which afterward--perhaps months or years afterward--open up new vistas of possibility for growth, enlightenment, and change. Failure to speak out about an injustice can turn out to be a negative miracle when it leads us find ways to eliminate prejudice and to see our own lives and the lives of others in a different and clearer light. Sometimes the negative miracle will show us an area of our lives that needs attention, either within ourselves or within those with whom we work, live, and love.

Often, the most painful periods in our lives turn out to have been the most important, and that is a negative miracle. Times when our relationships have broken down, times when we have made bad decisions about the direction of our lives, times when we have experienced problems at work or even lost our jobs. All such times are times of opportunity as well as crisis, though we may not recognize it while we are in the midst of them. The miracle is that we have grown from those experiences, perhaps become more empathic; the connections among us have become clearer and we have matured because of them. Negative miracles almost always disclose our humanness, and our shared humanity. Again, it is not the adversity that is good, but only what we do with it.

Often our mistakes turn out to have been negative miracles, too, leading us onward and upward toward a richer, more rewarding life. Indeed, failure may be the most common form that negative miracles take. Let me leave you with some thoughts about the mistakes we make, courtesy of my colleague Ed Harris:

1. Failing to set goals. Failure to set goals is a decision to fail.
2. Believing that our lives are controlled by outside forces. This mistake causes us to shift responsibility away from ourselves. Besides, there are no outside forces, at least none that can make us get out of bed in the morning if we choose not to.
3. Confusing the trivial with the tragic. As Ed says, "Tragedy is when you die after a wasted life. A child leaving dirty dishes after he said he'd do them, isn't."
4. Thinking that things will stay the same. It's a mistake to think that anything will last--and that goes for the bad as well as the good.
5. Letting one bad thing in our lives outweigh all the good. As in, "If the Red Sox would only win the World Series this year, my life would be OK."
6. Telling ourselves, "Don't make mistakes." There's no way a person can live a rich life without taking risks and making mistakes.
7. Believing that other people are happy and don't have any problems. If we knew our neighbors problems, we would almost always choose to keep our own.
8. Seeing everything as "either/or." Very few things in life have only two solutions. We need to get away from such simplistic thinking in both our personal and our communal lives. As Ed says, "Either you get this or you're stupid or you need to read this again or you have a better idea or you need to think about it some more."
9. Believing that if we ignore or avoid problems, they'll simply go away. Problems don't just go away.
10. Thinking that anything worth doing is worth doing right. Wrong! G. K. Chesterton, the great Catholic essayist, wrote that "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." If you want to do something, don't not do it because you can't do it perfectly. And if something is worth doing, do it no matter what.
11. Finally, failing to distinguish between that which we can control and that which we cannot. Reinhold Niebuhr had it right:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things
I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Most of us have made all of these mistakes at one time or another, or will. The question remains, what shall we do with them? Any mistake we make has the potential to become a negative miracle; though, remember, we may not always recognize it as such at the time we are making it.

Perhaps we were not meant to be perfect beings and lead perfect lives, after all. There is a story told of the Hasidic Rabbi Mendl of Kotsk, that a disciple came to tell him his woes. "Rabbi Mendl, I come from Rizhin. There, everything is simple, everything is clear. I prayed and I knew that I was praying. I studied, and I knew that I was studying. Here in Kotzk, everything is mixed up, confused; I suffer from it, Rabbi. Terribly, I am lost. Please help me so I can pray and study as before. Please help me to stop suffering." The Rabbi peered at his disciple in tears, and asked: "And whoever told you that God is interested in your studies and your prayers? And what if God preferred your tears and your suffering?"

May we be blessed enough to recognize the many miracles in our lives, not only the positive ones, but the negative ones as well. And may they lead us ever onward, toward fuller life, and stronger faith, and deeper hope. So may it be. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock