Ignorant of Miracles

Isaac Newton said that he was a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. He meant so many basic discoveries that we all take for granted were genius, or even miraculous in their time. Things like the concept of the zero.

You also stand on giant shoulders.

Think about the dirt you stand on.  Everything you own or use or do rests on it. You never think about it. It’s just there.

That dirt is hundreds or thousands of years of seeds growing, flowering, going from green and vibrant to woody and decaying.  Drying and then being broken down.  Dirt’s interactions of sun and minerals and plant chemicals and bacteria and fungus and worms is so complex that we haven’t figured them out yet. Dirt is different life cycles.  It’s the weeds that grow up and die quickly in the early spring or during the drought. It’s the large woody tree with its life and growth for hundreds of years and then there’s a decay and a branch falls and it slowly slowly molders.  Or a lightning strike and it falls.  It molders and there’s mushrooms and a depression in the ground and pith. All that is your dirt and that’s just part of it.  The substrate of your soil goes even further back into the slow relentless roll of geological time. You’re standing on dirt?   You are standing on volcanoes and sea beds and the slow drift of erosion and wind and wave.  Everything that lies about you is monumental. You are at the quiet center of a chorus of hundreds of living voices. You’re in the crest of a wave made up of millions of years.

Now let us add to that the possibility or even the reality that you are also the eye in a storm of miracles.

John tells us that only Jesus and the servants and I suppose possibly Mary knew what had been done at the feast of Cana. When the governor of the feast called the bridegroom over, the governor knew nothing about where the wine came from, and neither did the bridegroom. It’s quite possible the bride and the bridegroom did not find out that night at all.

The governor implies they were at the late stage of the feast where there had been a lot of drinking. And the bridegroom naturally would have other matters on his mind other than tracking down this minor domestic mystery. He may not even have noticed it was a mystery. He may have heard the governor compliment his wine and said thank you and thought no more of it.

It is possible—I would even say probable–that he heard the rumors of the miracle in the days to come but we’re not sure.  He may have lived his whole life never realizing that his wedding went smoothly because of Jesus first miracle.

How many placid moments that you forgot as soon as they happened were placid because off-stage the Son of God was breaking the order of creation for you?