Miracles in Real Life

My life has been filled with miracles. The most recent is the story of my granddaughter (see Notes from the Land of Splat!), considered by Stanford University Hospital to be its miracle baby of the year -- the university even made a special web page for her case for doctors worldwide to learn about it and perhaps to contribute to it. If you have read my postings on this situation, you know that she was born essentially unassembled and doctors had to put her lower half (or halves) back together and in the right places. She came home on Friday. She is missing some parts but can live without those. Later, the doctors may be able to bionicize some for her.

This unusual situation should not surprise those who have read Blest Atheist. I related there a series of miracles (or at least, highly implausible and unexplainable coincidences) in the lives of Shura of Siberia and Katya of Tula. In Shura's story, I told about meeting Maury, at the time the supervisor of the INS, in a very unusual way. We had requested a moleibin (Russian Orthodox prayer service) for Shura prior to his first surgery in the USA, a double amputation. Maury showed up at the moleibin, something that was quite unexpected by the congregation because he had moved to Baltimore a year earlier and no longer attended the church in Washington, DC. Although the moleibin itself had not been announced, that Tuesday when the moleibin took place was a holy day of obligation and since he had worked late at his Washington office, he decided to stop in at his old church after work enroute home. His appearance at the moleibin was the first and last time he ever came to that church after moving to Baltimore. At the church dinner that followed the moleibin, Maury asked us about our experience in obtaining a visa and upon hearing of the numerous difficulties we had encountered, he gave me his home phone number and told me to call him if we ever encountered any difficulties in the future with the INS. We did encounter them, and we did call him, and he did help immensely. That very fortunate collision of events -- one might call it a miracle -- I included in the book.

One would have thought that event and all its ramifications unique enough. However, yesterday I received an excited call from a reader of Blest Atheist. She had just read a recently published book about an icon that weeps myrrh. Many years ago, the icon was brought to the Russian Orthodox Church in Washington where Jewish parents brought their son, Christopher, to pray with the priest before the icon. Christopher had ocular tumors that had caused him to be blind. After their prayer, the icon began to drip with myrrh that splashed onto the floor in large puddles and took several days to dry up. The priest annointed the boy's eyes with the myrrh as it poured forth from the icon, and he was able to see. The parents converted to Orthodoxy on the spot. This story sounds implausible even to me, even though I know that miracles occur because they have occurred so ferquently in my life. I changed my mind about the plausibility, however, when the caller read me the name of the father of Christopher. It was Maury, our Maury, the one who showed up as if by divine inspiration and helped Shura.

As someone once said, perhaps coincidence happens at those times when God wishes to remain anonymous!