The Raven Foundation

Is there any rational reason to believe in miracles? The question is not about belief in miracles per se, but the reason behind belief. Lots of times the question of miracles involves the search for a rational explanation. If you find one, then bingo, you debunk the miracle and score another triumph for reason. Recently I experienced a miracle trifecta in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral: mass was being said at the central altar; to the left was a really impressive nearly life-size crèche complete with adoring camel; and to the right was a chapel dedicated to the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe to a Mexican peasant in 1531. Transubstantiation, incarnation and visitation – easily debunked miracles, right? Yet there I was all dewy-eyed and verklempt receiving communion, lighting a candle at the crèche, and joining the crowd adoring Our Lady of Guadalupe because it just happened to be her feast day (coincidence or miracle?!). Had I taken leave of my senses and given in to some emotional, romantic experience of the presence of God or had my reason come along for the ride?

The question of rational reasons to believe in miracles might seem to be off the table from the start as a contradiction in terms. Yet I do think that there is a very rational reason to believe in miracles, a reason rooted in the very mundane reality of this world. At Christmas, angels (another easily debunked miracle!) announced that the mundane reality of the world was about to change. They proclaimed that a Messiah had entered the world as a little child to bring peace on earth. Really, now?? That would be a reality shifter of volcanic magnitude! The reality of this world is definitely one of not-peace and the idea that it could be transformed by a child, well, that would be a miracle! I couldn’t agree more! What I’d like to propose is that the reality of not-peace is sustained by a powerful, totalizing logic which would take a miracle to disprove.

Here goes: the desire for peace on earth is nearly universal, yet peace has been an elusive dream. Why is that? There always seems to be one more obstacle to peace, one more evil villain who must be defeated before peace can reign on earth. The job of good people is to be vigilant against evil and, if possible, to learn to identify evil before it can do harm to innocent people. This is the current quest of our own Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, Department of Defense and so on. The logic of good versus evil requires them to identify evil and destroy it by any means possible, all in the service of goodness and peace.    

This logic is familiar to us and it permits the use of violence by good people in the name of peace. I have written about this many times before, so it will not be surprising when I point out that everyone who employs violence is doing so in the name of some ultimate good or another. Goodness is defined using me and my aims as the standard, of course, and evil is always located somewhere outside of me and my community. If goodness is always me-orientated, then anyone who opposes me, my goals or desires is by definition evil. Do you see how totalizing this is and how completely logical? If you begin with the premise that goodness equals me and evil is that which opposes me, then every “me” on the planet can self-identify as good and justify the destruction (figuratively or literally) of all the evil others out there who get in my way. We see it in domestic politics, international relations, and our own personal relationships when others seem to be willfully intent on obstructing our desires. They can be none other than evil by virtue of their opposition to the good – moi! This logic prevents us from seeing the truth that our enemies are using the same logic to define themselves as good and we as evil. All parties to a conflict use this logic to justify their use of violence so no one employing violence is self-identifying as evil. It is the good people, at least in their own opinion, who are doing all the bad things. Paradoxically yet logically, we find ourselves very busy creating a world of not-peace in the name of peace while never doubting our own goodness! A real predicament, isn’t it?

So what is the way out of this logical system? We could try to reason our way out, but ironically we have reasoned our way into it so successfully that any challenge to the system fits neatly into it: challenge my goodness or use violence against me and I have proof of your wickedness. Yet if I challenge your goodness or use violence against you, magically this is evidence of my commitment to the good. So anything that could crack open the logic at play here can’t come from within the system itself. A successful challenge would have to come from outside the system and appear other worldly, outside of our everyday experience – in other words, a miracle. A miracle that allows us to see ourselves in the face of our enemies and our enemies as children of God. The miracle can come to us in and through our mundane experiences: a birth, a meal, a message of love. When it comes, the logic of good and evil and of violence in the name of peace is revealed for a lie and peace becomes possible.

I believe in miracles because their existence challenges our reliance on logic and reason, which is an absolutely good thing given how much trouble logic can get us into. But miracles have a logic of their own, the logic of the possible impossible. In fact, the idea of a miracle might actually have some support from mathematics, the language of science. In the early twentieth century, the mathematician Kurt Godel discovered what he called the theorem of incompleteness which is the proof of a paradox, that there are true but unprovable statements. True but unprovable: maybe that’s what miracles are. You see, it was very reasonable for me to be verklempt at St. Pat’s and for all of us to be a bit dewy-eyed at the sight of the babe in the manger. Miracles make sense! Peace is possible! Merry Christmas!

I have just returned from a two week trip abroad with my husband Keith. We travelled by air from Chicago to London to Milan to Messina, Sicily. Then we travelled by car to the port of Milazzo where we boarded a ferry boat for a two hour ride to Salina, a small Aeolian island in the Tyrrhenian sea. All this to attend the 2011 Colloquium on Violence and Religion, the international academic group devoted to exploring René Girard’s mimetic theory. Salina is a beautiful place more suited to leisurely afternoons on the beach and late night suppers with plenty of wine than a conference, but we mostly resisted temptation.

One thing I love about my involvement with mimetic theory is the chance to travel and meet people from around the world, who become, after years of conferences, your friends. Attendees came from Austria, Holland, France, England, Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, Japan, the U.S. and Italy, of course. You can imagine the cacophony of languages and accents, but thankfully the language of the conference is English. The biggest hurdle this year was that Italian time is a lot like Italian driving: schedules and rules are more of suggestions than anything binding. It was particularly fun to watch the Dutch rolling their eyes or overhear the Austrians tsk-tsking as sessions started late and ran long. Thankfully, there were no international incidents but all those border crossing, languages and cultural concepts of time got me thinking about differences. Especially since we came home on Friday, June 24, the day Governor Cuomo signed the gay marriage law in New York.

What is the difference between nationalities? Do folks really fall into the easy stereotypes I observed in Salina? And what is the difference between opposite or same-sex marriage? Are they different, or the same, only as the law says so? Human rights discussions always revolve around what stance to take toward difference. Do we tolerate differences, the live and let live approach, or do we try to evaluate differences so we can support the good ones and eradicate the bad ones? Maybe there are different differences, some we can live with and some we need to stamp out. My attitude toward differences comes from my engagement with mimetic theory – no surprise there. Mimetic theory focuses our attention on the way in which all of us use difference to know we are good. It’s an odd reality of identity formation, one that is almost completely unacknowledged, that we use others as foils in our sense of self-worth. It was easy to see in Salina: the on-time Dutch knew they were good because they weren’t the late Italians. As annoyed as they were about the lack of any real schedule, they were no doubt feeling a tiny bit self-satisfied by how much better they are at sticking to agendas than Italians. Luckily the consequences of an on-time identity are not all that extreme, but the difference issue in gay marriage has more serious consequences.

When we need someone to occupy a category of badness to know we are good, we all get locked into false identities. The so-called bad people, in this case the GLBT community, don’t have much choice but to hide or pretend they aren’t different at all if they want to avoid discrimination and hate. They can flamboyantly display their difference in an attempt to live outside of the majority’s disdain for them, but that is as false as hiding. And the only way for the good people to hold on to their goodness is by righteously denouncing everything gay. The insistence on difference between heterosexual and gay, leaves us with rigid and artificial categories: a (falsely) good majority, a silent and suffering underground, and a minority exaggerating the difference to prove a point. No room for change, no room for honest identities or true goodness to emerge.

What does true goodness do with difference? Often we labor under the false idea that if everyone were truly good all differences would vanish and we’d have this homogenized world with one language, one nationality, one way of dealing with time, one kind of sexuality. The irony is that exactly the opposite would occur. True goodness would support an explosion of difference. We can see how it works with gay marriage. Forcing gays underground creates an illusion of homogeneity. When true goodness takes hold, the diversity emerges in all its glory – gay, lesbian, bi, trans, whatever it is doesn’t matter at all anymore and so it can come out of the darkness into the light. The diversity will not be seen as a threat to anyone’s identity because goodness takes borderlines and incorporates them into itself. When differences lose their fascination, they take with them all our excuses to exclude, to hate, to destroy. What emerges is a world of difference and the possibility for peace.

These changes take place slowly but when the tipping point is reached, the change whisks through our lives with a speed that belies the preceding struggle. What can we do to help the change along? At the COV&R conference we were welcomed by Domenica Mazzu, Director of Centro Europeo di Studi su Mito E Simbolo. I don’t remember the details of her talk but  I wrote next to her name in the program: “Live as if – as if what is right is also what is real.” It might seem naïve, but I think living as if peace is possible now is what will make it happen. If we can live as if we don’t need someone to be wrong to know we are right, as if we don’t need someone to be bad to know we are good, then we are paving the way for peace. I think of it like rehearsing for a play – you sweat to memorize the lines and to deliver them at the right time from the right place on the stage and at first it’s stiff and labored. But the more you rehearse the more natural the words feel coming out of your mouth until you say them as if they are your own. That’s what living as if could make possible. We might begin to realize that difference isn’t something we need at all, but something that just is. Peace will arrive when we can say our lines from the heart: on time or late, gay or straight, it’s all good.