Do you believe in miracles?
It’s a question I’ve heard all my life – one that I can recall asking others at a very young age, and one that I’ve been asked in turn at a considerably older age. The question is complicated, as even youngsters understand. What, first of all, do you mean by the term itself – “miracle”? And then, what do you mean by “believe in”? And so the question “Do you believe in miracles?” tags along like a shadow, impossible to grasp and impossible to escape.
But every so often something happens that affords a glimpse of an answer – a glimpse also into the very idea of hope as an escarpment beyond the realm of mere coincidence, where willful actions by flesh-and-blood people lead to something that looks to me like grace.
I’ll tell the story as I remember it being told to me. A young woman friend of mind some years ago was suffering from a serious neurological disorder of unknown nature. She has since recovered. But one day during the period of her illness, while riding on the subway in New York City, she suddenly experienced the loss of her eyesight. She waited a few moments, thinking her vision might return, but it did not. And so she did what anyone might do, though it required a certain amount of trust in humankind. She turned to the person next to her, explained what happened, and asked if this person, who turned out to be a woman, could serve as a guide up to the street level. The woman heard out my friend's request, took her by the arm, and said “Of course.”
The train came to a stop. The doors slid open. My friend held tight to the woman as she left the subway car and threaded her way along the crowded platform. They went through the turnstile, and once beyond the two of them flowed with the traffic toward the steps leading up to the outer world. As they began to climb the steps, my friend’s sight slowly began to return – the light at the top coming into view, the jostling people all around turning slowly into visible shapes. My friend turned to the woman at her elbow, who had led her from the subway car, and saw that the woman’s other hand held a thin white can, and that she was blind.
I’m not sure I’ll ever know the right name for this event. But I think of it always when I try to locate hope. Because so often it turns out to be at the miraculous intersection of one person’s faith and another’s charity.