Miracles exist. This is not a matter for debate: medicine records them, the press announces them, even popular television shows from Oprah to Unsolved Mysteries bear witness to the happenstance of miracles. How and why miracles occur is often as not the result of prayer.
There is always the miracle of circumstance. An ex-Californian working in the Oklahoma City Federal Building feels a rumble: used to earthquakes he instinctively dives under his desk. In that particular office, of fourteen other employees, he becomes the sole survivor of the infamous April '95 terrorist bombing.
Then there is the miracle of prayed-for reversal. The entire country is aware of the California teenager who needed a bone marrow transplant to fight a growing cancer, how her parents conceived another child just to supply the genetic match, and now, five years later, she is alive and considered in permanent remission. This was a triumph of family and science - but it was not the miracle. The miracle was in the waiting. During the fifteen-month period from the time the cancer was diagnosed, the pregnancy started and the newborn sibling old enough to draw bone marrow, the family prayed to beat the odds. Miraculously, for no known scientific reason, the teenager's cancer did not climb past the point of no return while she waited on the life-saving efforts of her family.
There is the miracle of survival and direct communication. Journalist Reynolds Price, an unchurched believer in God, sat on the verge of death with a cancerous tumor glued to his spine, the tumor resisting radiation therapy and the therapy itself reducing Price to a near-quadriplegic mass of pain -
In that black trough I remember looking up to the ceiling and addressing what I must have thought was God, the last unchangeable bafflement - "How much more do I take?" A long pause, then a voice at normal speaking strength said the one word "More."
Whether the force...