THE TROUBLE WITH MIRACLES
"I love rocky mountain sides blanketed in snow. My brother fell off of a mountain once, tumbled 2,000 feet below and landed in a huge pile of snow. If not for the snow, he would have died. The snow later almost killed him and threatened to take his fingers and toes as he lived through a blizzard overnight after the fall, before limping out of the valley to the rescuers who were looking for him on the other side of the mountain. Mountains and snow are all at once beautiful and terrible, same as the lives we live. We pray for grace that we might have the strength to hold both truths at once."
That is the original caption I wrote for this painting. There is a lot left unsaid, hence the blog post you're about to read, and it's something I'm still unpacking almost five years later.
My brother was some kind of atheist/agnostic at the time, and definitely did not buy into Christian mythology, when he fell off Pyramid Peak in Colorado in 2017 and then somehow walked away and found a pair of cyclists who flagged down the rescue team for him. At the time I was struggling with my own deep doubts about Christianity and my ability to believe in a Christian god at all. I was very into daily, 10 and 20-minute long meditation sessions and I was using that to try to to connect with the god I thought I knew, because nothing else seemed to be working anymore.
When I got the news that my brother did not report back from his climb and that it was dark in Colorado, I immediately went to prayer. I prayed constantly. I busied myself with house cleaning and distracted myself with paranormal podcasts, whispering "let him be ok" as the hours passed. I broke down crying multiple times the next day, after hearing that a blizzard had come through the area where my brother went missing and was still raging to the point that no helicopters could go in to look for him. I kept picturing him, a broken body on a mountainside or dangling from ropes like other stories I had heard of dead climbers in treacherous mountains, and my mind would cloud over with terror and grief at the thought.
I was overwhelmed by relief on the second morning, after I got the news that they had found him and hearing about how he managed to walk himself out of the valley he had fallen into. But that relief was soon followed by confusion that crept in more and more frequently as I processed the events of those three days. What the fuck had just happened? Why did it happen? What does this mean about the way god works? (and don't you dare say "in mysterious ways," because that was not good enough for me anymore).
I got to fly from California to see him in the hospital, recovering from frostbite, a dislocated elbow, and a pelvic fracture. Minimal injuries for what had happened. His mind was intact, his body would recover, and soon he would be out climbing again, a wiser person with every outing. And still I was unsettled and confused by the whole thing.
I had believed that god used suffering to make us into better people in his image. I had also believed that god would protect those of us who had faith and trust in him. I had believed these two conflicting things for long enough. These beliefs started to crumble after a fateful trip to India when I was 18 (a story for another blog post), and this was the final undoing.
Ironically, this event was the deathblow to my belief in the good and all-powerful god I thought I knew. It took a long time to finally die and I basically had it on life support up until I pulled the plug a few years later. But while this miracle should have shored up my faith, all it did was further dismantle it.
I could not make sense of why my family had been spared this tragedy. I could not make sense of why it happened at all. Did we pray him back to life? No. He walked himself out of that valley. Did angels break his fall? No. Snowbanks did. Did we earn this good fortune by our prayers? No. What makes our prayers different than the prayers of a mother whose child has cancer, who has to watch her child die slowly in front of her? What kind of good or powerful god doles out good fortune and tragedy willy-nilly regardless of the prayers or promises we make, regardless of our efforts to collaborate or plead or be heard? What good is that god to anyone?
Something in particular that I have to mention which just perfectly exemplifies the bizarre contradictions Christians keep alive in their heads was a lady from my parent's church on facebook, who said something along the lines of "God must have something really amazing planned for him!" That just made me wither inside. She had no idea that my brother had left the faith, apparently, or she assumed this would bring him back into the fold and make him into an evangelist with his amazing, miraculous survival story (spoiler alert, it did not, and my brother doesn't really even like to talk about the fall except as a warning to others to stay prepared and to not take unnecessary risks in the wilderness).
The "good and powerful god" I grew up believing in died on that mountain during those three days. Something new walked out of that valley with my brother. Something I cannot understand, or even really describe as I hold this space for beautiful things and for terrible things to happen, for a benevolent spirit that loves us and hopes to comfort us through tragedy, and for a cruel one that we can only hope does not notice us and throw down lightning bolts on our heads, for both to be true and necessary.
You'll see miracles if you look for them. But they can't be handed out by the small, impossible version of a god that is truly good and all-powerful.
