Nature Miracles

Today the historical accuracy of Jesus’ “startling deeds” is widely recognized among scholars, yet the line between miracle and magic in the Greco-Roman world of the first century was often difficult to establish. Some scholars claim that there is no difference between the two, therefore Jesus can be labeled as a magician. But magicians used complicated rituals and intelligible spells, whereas Jesus did not. His adversaries, in fact, never attacked him with the charge of magic, although some said that he was in league with Satan. 

One of the criteria used by scholars to establish the historical accuracy of the gospels accounts is the criterion of multiple attestation, which focuses on Jesus’ sayings or deeds that are attested in more than one source. Only one miracle is mentioned in all the four gospels, and that is the multiplication of the bread and the fish. Yet, while I have no doubt about Jesus’ exceptional healing power, I must confess that I have a hard time believing that he could feed four thousand people with seven loads of bread and a few fish, but I’m working on it. 

In The Business of Heaven C.S.Lewis wrote about this particular miracle with his usual wit:                                                                                                                                    

“Once in the desert, Satan had tempted Him to make bread out of stones. He refused the suggestion. The Son does nothing except what he sees the Father do; perhaps we may without boldness surmise that the direct change from stone to bread appeared to be not quite in the hereditary style. Little bread into much bread is quite a different matter. Every year God makes a little corn into much corn.”

The calming of the storm and the feeding of the four thousand both fall into the category of the so-called “nature miracles”. Even Catholic scholars, such as Reverend J.P. Meier, are skeptical about their plausibility because they are unheard of in the natural world, whereas healing still happen today in religious settings, so it’s not so difficult to give them credit.

                                                                                                                                         

Being born in Naples, I’ve heard of a particular nature miracle for as long as I can remember. It concerns the liquefaction of Saint Gennaro’s blood, a martyr who was beheaded by the Romans. His hardened blood is kept in an ampoule in the Cathedral, where the miracle happens twice a year, on the first Saturday of May and on the 19th of September. Before the service, the Neapolitans carry statues of saints in a procession, following the silver bust of S. Gennaro. Later, in the Cathedral, the priests show the ampoule to the people, while a group of women pray ecstatically until the blood liquefies. Then the bells start ringing, and the crowd pushes its way through to take a closer look at the ampoule.

This miracle has a precise meaning to the natives of Naples, namely that no major disaster is expected to

strike the city in the near future. Actually, when in 1980 the blood did not  liquefy, an earthquake occurred

which took the lives of two thousand people, and when the miracle failed to happen in 1528, the plague

broke out in Naples. The Vatican removed Saint Gennaro from its list of saints on the ground of insufficient

historical documentation,  but the Neapolitans rebelled to this decision, almost causing a riot, so the Saint

was reinstated. However, the Vatican does not count the phenomenon of the liquefaction of blood as a

proof of sainthood. In spite of that, my mom paid attention to its successful accomplishment , and as a child I

I did too. 

Why I Believe in Jesus

There are prominent scholars who argue that no earth-shaking event took place after Jesus’ death, except for some compelling visions and dreams. According to them, the apostles felt that Jesus was still with them spiritually, and over the years the Church came up with the tradition of him being raised physically. They think that this is the most beautiful interpretation of Jesus’ story, because it gives him back his exceptional value as a human being. 

Other scholars strongly believe that this version of the birth of Christianity is just not good enough and I agree with them, because to see Jesus as nothing but a moral teacher leads inevitably to a complete distortion of the circumstances of his death. The truth is that a Messiah was awaited and Jesus’ disciples thought he was the one. His crucifixion, given their religious belief, could only mean that they were mistaken, for the Messiah was not supposed to die, especially not by the hands of the Romans. This is why any historian who looks at the gospels through the eye of a first century Jew knows that something must have happened to bring the apostles back to their first conviction, namely that Jesus was the awaited Messiah. Love was  simply not enough to motivate them, in fact they fled when he was arrested and he died alone.

The birth of the Church is not the only event that it’s difficult to explain if one rules out the resurrection. Anyone who knows something about ancient Jews will find hard to believe that, almost overnight, they began to worship a human being as divine. They considered the pagan idea that gods can take human guise as blasphemous, yet they called Jesus the Son of God. For Jesus, the disciples completely transformed the basic shape of their messianic belief, namely accepted a Messiah who would bring peace and justice to the entire world and not only to the Jews. He would not rebuild a temple in Jerusalem, but a community of disciples instead. He would not fight a war, but the Devil himself.

According to Harris, in the modern Eastern world there are people who are said to perform miracles and to have resurrected after death. I’ve read of a Tibetan woman named Dawa Drolma (her son is still alive), who died at the age of sixteen and came back to life five days later. She was clinically dead but her body remained intact, so her family didn’t give her burial. She returned to the physical world with a deep understanding of the afterlife. Although Tibetan Lamas were not inclined to give prominence to a woman, they had to recognize her inexplicable knowledge of Buddhist theology and her paranormal abilities. I bet Harris wouldn’t have too many problems believing this story and, as a matter of fact, I don’t either. Why should I, if all miracles come from God? Harris wonders why an Indian guru who is said to have returned from the dead doesn’t become the center of a worldwide religion. The answer is that we don’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God because he was raised and God was the doer of his resurrection. I wouldn’t even believe there is a God if Jesus hadn’t come on earth. We don’t believe because of what he said and did, for we are hardly able to understand its meaning. We believe because his whole life and death awaken 

something so compelling in our heart that nothing we experienced before has ever been even remotely close to it. This is the grace people of faith talk about. We believe because Jesus lives inside of us. There is no other reason. 

                                               

 

Sam Harris and The New Atheism

                                                                                                                                                  

Recently I was forced to reconsider self-knowledge practice in the attempt to get to the bottom of  my son’s passion for atheism. He’s very fond of Sam Harris and he asked me to read his best sellers, The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape, so I patiently submitted myself to the task.

Harris praises meditation and the Buddhist wisdom. Buddhism stemmed from Hinduism and  they share the same doctrine of reincarnation. Buddhists don’t believe in God or in the afterlife.The original teaching of the Buddha implies that we have no soul. What is it, then, that according to him is going to reincarnate? The patterns that we create during our lives, namely our karma.

There is no Self involved in the concept of karma. Many Buddhists believe that we are like a stellar constellation: From our planet we see it as a whole, whereas it is just an agglomerate of stars. In the same way, we perceive ourselves as whole beings, but our Self is an illusion. The enlightened ones will annihilate their “patterns” when they reach Nirvana. Today I find this ordeal quite depressing. 

Harris insists that mysticism is a rational enterprise which requires explicit instructions, similar to those, and I quote, for operating a lawn mower. It doesn’t occur to him that some of us might not be inclined towards this kind of spiritual search. I tried it and I found it ineffective. Maybe I couldn’t reach the point where all dualism and self-centeredness disappear. Maybe I’m not intellectually sophisticated enough to appreciate the wonders of a teaching that can be compared to the instructions for operating a lawn mower.

Jesus came for those like me, who need emotional involvement. The awareness that he died for us brings our affection to its climax. This awareness is the byproduct of a rational reflection on his life, actions and motives. Paradoxically as it may sound, the belief in his resurrection, which was a supra-natural event, is also the product of a rational study of early Christianity.

However, Harris is witty and argumentative and I agree with many of his ideas. But when it comes to the analysis of religious beliefs  he misses the point. If only one person in a given social context, he says, would maintain that a certain Palestinian was born from a virgin and came back to life after being crucified, this person would certainly be labeled as crazy.  For Harris, the only reason why these beliefs are considered acceptable is that they are so widespread. He doesn’t even try to articulate an explanation for why billions of people  believe in Jesus’ story, not to mention why ninety percent of the world’s population believes in

some form of deity. For him, we are all victims of our illusions.

True, the number of people of faith says nothing about the existence of God but, to the atheist, it says a lot about himself, namely that he’s one of the few enlightened ones who understand what faith is all about. But what if these very smart people have gone lost in rationality? They have shut their brains to the perception of the divine, overloading them with the concept of “evidence”. Without evidence, nothing is worthy of consideration. Yet, in every  religious tradition, God is spirit. He transcends nature, so why should we find proofs of His existence in nature?

According to my husband, there is a philosophical quasi fallacy in Harris’ argument against faith. Harris thinks that ancient men turned to religion to explain phenomena that were later adequately accounted for by modern science, therefore, in the twenty-first century, we should give up the obsolete beliefs in the supra-natural. Harris also thinks that the desire for happiness is innate to the human being, as it is the awareness that it can be achieved only through a peaceful, civilized behavior. For him, the moral sense doesn’t come from God but stems from the ultimately selfish attempt to live a well-balanced life. Therefore, Harris builds his philosophy around the idea that the human kind possesses an innate quality, namely the desire for happiness.

Now, if religions were largely generated by independent cultures with no interaction with one another, and today  90% of the world population still tends to believe in God (or something equivalent) in spite of the discoveries of modern science, this tendency may  also be investigated as an innate quality on a par with the desire for happiness. But if this is the case, Harris’  founding ethics on one innate trait and disregarding the other as obsolete, is a judgment of value.  

Future investigation into the biology of happiness and religion may reveal that the two notions are connected in such a way that  happiness may be achieved only through the fulfillment of a religious project.

Harris trivializes Christianity, reducing it to a number of supernatural events. But there is a lot more to it than that. After all, only the gospels of Luke and Matthew celebrate his virginal birth. If one day it was discovered that this is just a myth, the Christian belief would have to adjust but wouldn’t die. However, all the four canonical gospels narrate about Jesus’ ministry,  death and resurrection, and it’s there that our faith is founded.

Meditating on the Amalfi Coast

                                                                                                                                                 

Love is risky, for when we love we make ourselves vulnerable. Some of us are afraid, and subconsciously choose to hurt one another to avoid lowering our defenses. In that context, to show our love is too dangerous. So it is the love for God. People are afraid of having to give up too much if they come to believe in God, and even more if they come to believe that Jesus died for them. Yet, what Jesus asks of us can be surprisingly easy. If you renounce your self-absorption, you’ll gain a new self instead. 

I couldn’t have changed my life by an act of the will. I embraced Jesus and it simply happened. This is the huge difference between Christianity and other major religions: They have teachers who show the way to salvation. Jesus is the only one who claims to BE the way. What does that mean? Only those who experience it can understand it. Jesus faced humiliation, torture and death because he loved us. God is Christ-like, so He loves us. If we are sure of this we’ll love him back and everything will come easy, out of pure love. We won’t have to work on ourselves anymore, if we believe in Jesus.

                                                                                                                                                                                           

When I was attracted to Buddhism and self-knowledge I tried and tried again, but my life did not improve. Why? Because I was once again concentrating on myself, and there was no love involved. I was in my early twenties back then and I was spending a lot of time with some friends of mine who had managed to rent a house in the most amazing area of the Amalfi coast. It was an old villa with thirteen rooms, a fireplace and a beautiful terrace. When the house was built there was no water supply, so a few rooms were beneath the ground level in order to gather the rain and be used as swimming pools. For us they became the grotto party area, furnished with candles and pillows. The rent was very affordable because one had to climb seven hundred steps from the road to reach that house, which was located above the small town of Praiano, and from the road to the beach there were six hundred more steps. But we were young and it was a magical world.

In that house I lived the most wonderful moments of my life. If I close my eyes I can still see the coastal mountains and the blue sea at the bottom of the twelve hundred steps. During the summer we would go all the way down and then swim or climb a hill or take a rowing-boat to reach an empty beach, the existence of which was known to very few people. We carried sandwiches and beverages but no sunscreen or hats. All the girls were rigorously topless, but if there was a lot of sex going on I wasn't part of it. I had just ended a long-term relationship and I wasn’t in the mood. The breathtaking beauty of the place was enough to make me feel elated.

In the evening we would climb our way up to the trattoria, where we ate the most delicious sea food, and then up to the villa, where self-knowledge practice would go on into the night.

During the winter we didn't go out much. We would seat around the fireplace and sing, talk and dance. We could see the Mediterranean deep down under the steep mountains. At night the moon  would draw a silver sword into the water, and all the small boats anchored near the beach would turn black against the light. 

It was the perfect environment for meditation. I tried really hard, but it didn’t work for me. I remember clearly how our meetings were carried out. My friends and I would sit in a circle. One of us would read a passage that would represent a negative state of mind, for example resentment. Then, after turning off the lights, our leader would guide the others into complete relaxation. Finally, we had to imagine a small luminous sphere penetrating inside our head and at the same time face our resentment. 
At the moment the trick seemed to work; whatever it was that had upset me didn’t seem so important anymore. We were supposed to become familiar with the peaceful state of mind that occurred with relaxation, to the point that we would be able to evoke it in real life stressful situations. I practiced this technique for about two years, but I never reached that point. To tell you the truth, I got tired of the silly little sphere that would not appear inside my head when I needed it. It just wasn’t my thing, and now I know the reason. 

In “The Lord” the theologian Romano Guardini wrote:

”Buddha is free, but his freedom is not that of Christ. Possibly Buddha’s freedom is only the ultimate and supremely liberating knowledge of the vanity of this fallen world. Christ’s freedom is based not on a negative cognition, but on the love of God.”