Monday, March 21, 2011

Miracles

It's interesting that Jesus made something big out of something small, such as the miracle of feeding the 5,000.

But Jesus also works a miracle in reverse by making something big (everything and everyone that wants to be something) into something little, makes it infinitely nothing in humility. Perhaps only God can point out another's weakness to the extent that it's nothing. And perhaps only faith can help one see a miracle.

Dostoyevsky writes, "The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Faith does not... spring from the miracle, but the miracle from faith."
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Seth C. Holler said...

"...perhaps only faith can enable one to see a miracle."

When I read The Brothers K last fall, I was struck and troubled by the sentences about realism and faith. Your interpretation of esp. the last sentence, about miracles springing from faith, is one I hadn't considered. For there's also a scary way to read that line: that there aren't really any miracles, but that "wishing makes it so": that we see what we want to see, sometimes to the extent of making stuff up.

In any case, the last page of the novel more clearly a celebration of revelation. And extraordinarily moving.

March 21, 2011 at 5:06 PM

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