NOM

What does being healed by a miracle really look like?

Pope Francis is fast tracking an Italian teenager named Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia at age 15, to join the ranks of the Catholic Saints. The pope has identified the requisite two miracles. A boy's malformed pancreas became whole after he came into contact with one of Carlo's shirts, and a young woman's brain hemorrhage was alleviated after he mother prayed at Carlo's tomb.

I find it interesting that miracle workers nowadays don't even have to be present at the miracle. Or alive.

The LDS church claims to be a church of miracles, but our leaders don't seem to be very good at actually producing any. They are so incapable of performing miracles that they will stoop so low as to claim the failure to heal as a miracle (Bednar, Eyring). Should they take the lead of the Catholic church and start attributing impressive recoveries from illness to dead prophets? But then, I can't imagine RMN allowing Hinkley to get the credit for someone recovering from a brain hemorrhage on his watch. I think the LDS equivalent would be for the living prophet to take credit for anything that looks miraculous during their tenure, whether he was present or not. Give an apostolic blessing to the entire planet and then sit back and reap the praise.

What is a miracle?

Ah, miracles Cosmic winks from the big cheese ... We spend our days running around like ants and every now and then, poof! A parking spot opens up right in front of you, just as you're about to give up. Who gets the credit? The invisible hand of the parking gods? Your stellar driving skills? Your superior Intuition?

...Now, you can go around thanking the cosmos for every lucky break, which hey, never hurts. See good luck as a cosmic nudge, a playful, "See? You're not entirely stuck in the mud, are you?" find grand meaning in the most mundane moments each time something serendipitous happens. Did the universe just high-five you? Are you a total rockstar at life?

Or, just probabilities - a million monkeys at a million typewriters, eventually one's bound to crank out Shakespeare. ... a confluence of random chance. You toss in a combination of numbers into a hat filled with countless other numbers. Mere statistics, the hand reaching down to pluck your name.

miracles - tickles our emotional bits. Makes us feel special, chosen even. But hey, if believing in sky wizards gets you through the day, who am I to judge? Just remember, whispering wishes to a bearded fellow in the clouds isn't exactly helpful when real work is required.

The universe is a far stranger, more magnificent place than any miracle story. Billions of galaxies swirling in the cosmic ballet, a symphony of physics playing out across the aeons. Perhaps that's the true wonder – not divine interventions, but the sheer improbability of existence itself.

Cosmic coincidence makes for a good story too.