would confirm my healing or go on devastating me, for the moment I barely cared. No prior tastes in my old life had meant as much as this new chance at a washed and clarified view of my fate. (Frank, 1994, p. 1109)
That Reynolds Price was reliving his 1984 ordeal in a book written ten years later - A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing (Atheneum) - is indicative of what that miraculous fate was.
Circumstance versus intervention - in the latter case, when the party knows that a miracle is necessary to defy fate, it is always prayer that provokes the miracle.
Prayer provoking miracles: the modern, rational mind rebels against such "superstition" - even when firmly believing in one's own organized faith. Particularly the American mind.
We are a people raised on the belief that one should "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" and be self-reliant. Beholden to no one. Independent. Traditionally, of course, we believe in God in one form or another, but a God founded on Reason. Contemporary man and woman may not even believe in God, preferring Science instead. Neither Reason nor Science tolerates the possibility of linking prayer and miracles.
"No man is an island," translated one of the poet-scholars of the King James edition of the Bible, the classic of English literature and inspiration to billions in the nearly four hundred years since its transcription. The American's prideful sense of sole accomplishment would do well to remember that our "pioneer spirit" was also what built this land - a combination of independence, cooperation and helping hands pulling across a vast wilderness of nature that, by comparison to the limitless oceans of the universe, was a single drop in the story of humanity. "I am a rock," "I'll be what I am, a solitary man" write the pop poets of the time, yet their pronouncements of solitude never lose sight of the fact that one is not an island totally divorced from other con...